An Analysis of Public Programs Related to Women’s Entrepreneurship and Access to Labor Markets
In the recent years, economic performance in Turkey has been praised due to its sustainedgrowth trends, stability and capacity to weather the global financial crisis. However, a number of issues related to the labor market and unemployment trends c...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/632841479284443745/An-analysis-of-public-programs-related-to-women-s-entrepreneurship-and-access-to-labor-markets http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25413 |
| Summary: | In the recent years, economic
performance in Turkey has been praised due to its
sustainedgrowth trends, stability and capacity to weather
the global financial crisis. However, a number of issues
related to the labor market and unemployment trends continue
to be the economic and political underbelly to these
positive trends. The conspicuously low labor
forceparticipation among women over the years deserves
special attention among these problems. The objective of
this report is to provide an institutional analysis of
public policies and programstargeting women’s access to
labor markets and entrepreneurial activities. The report
seeks to provide a comprehensive inventory of public
programs, targeting women’s employment and entrepreneurship
and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these programs
with respect to their sustainability, institutional
commitment, and their ability to address barriers to women’s
labor force participation. In Turkey, women’s participation
in the labor force has historically been low. While 34
percentof the women were in the labor force in 1990, the
rate declined to 26 percent over the courseof the following
decade and recovered up to 29 percent by 2012. Cross-country
comparisons show that women in Turkey participate in the
labor force at a much smaller rate compared to countries in
all income groups. This is the case even in comparison with
the lower-middle income countries, where women’s labor
participation rate is 40 percent. A final focus in this
study has been on the initiatives that aim to encourage
women’s entrepreneurship. Given that the percentages of
women among entrepreneurs in Turkey are even lower than that
of women in the labor force, if the barriers to women’s
entrepreneurial activities are removed, it appears that
there is substantial room for improvement. This report sets
its goal as interrogating in a holistic manner, programs’
objectives, contents,and ability to address problems
standing in the way of women’s labor force participation.
The aim of the report is not to conduct an impact analysis
of these public programs, but to provide an extensive
inventory of institutions and the specific departments and
the programs that are directly responsible to carry out the
public policies on the issue of women’s employment and
entrepreneurship. Programs evaluated in this report were
chosen on the basis of their scope both in terms of their
targets and funding schemes. Local programs with very narrow
scopes were not taken into the inventory. Only the programs,
which target to create new employment and entrepreneurship
opportunities for women with a wide sphere of influence,
were inc luded. The public programs covered in this report
can be also assessed based on the sectors ofeconomic
activity in which women’s employment and entrepreneurship is
promoted: Our report shows that the programs carry the
danger of repeating existing gendered divisions of labor and
the ensuing capacity to access the labor market. For
long-term positive results inchanging existing horizontal
and vertical segregations in the market, there should be
more focus on how to change gendered assumptions about
divisions of labor within the programs’design. |
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