Female Labor Force Participation in Turkiye: Revisiting the 1988-2008 Period

This study aims to investigate the changes in the structural determinants of labor force participation in the Turkish labor market for the post-1980 market liberalization period disaggregated by rural-urban location, gender, age, and education. As a characteristic of the period under investigation, it also examines the effects of the economic crises on producing an added worker effect versus a discouraged worker effect on particularly vulnerable groups to these effects, such as married women. This paper employs the microdata from the Household Labor Force Survey for the two periods 1988 and 2007 to analyze the long-term labor supply behavior in the Turkish labor market through a logit regression analysis for the whole samples and separately for groups disaggregated by gender. Additionally, it uses the Household Labor Force Survey microdata sets for 2000-2001 and 2007-2008 to test the existence and dominance of added versus discouraged worker effects on married women whose husbands were unemployed in the years of economic crises. As a result, this study finds that being married and having small children in the household decreases women's labor force participation, unlike men. However, economic crises increase the possibility of labor market participation for married women facing husbands' unemployment.