Female Labor Force Participation Tendency: The Case of Turkey

Female labor force participation is one of the most important factors in ensuring sustainable growth and development for a country. Women can have opportunity to reflect their lifetime experiences to the future generations in case they become mothers. Thus, it is expected from a woman who has her economic freedom to be more qualified in terms of future expectations and the status in society when compared with a woman not employed in labour market. In this direction, it is observed that female labor force participation rate has been recently considered as an important factor affecting the level of development of a country.In this paper, main features and general situation of women employment in Turkey are examined theoretically and empirically. In the study, firstly, the factors affecting the female labor force participation tendency are revealed with reference to the Turkey case. Then, it is aimed to detect whether the female labor force participation have differences by regions; and if there are, the aim is to determine the reasons of these differences. For this purpose, the data obtained from Household Labor Force Statistics prepared by the Turkish Statistical Institute for the year 2014 have been utilized. The participation of working women in full-time and part-time labor force have been examined by using binary logit model.