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The Covid-19 pandemic led to unprecedented disruptions in the labor market. Turkey implemented a worker dismissal ban to mitigate the adverse effects, effective from April 2020 to June 2021. The pandemic and unveiled measures put pressure against recent university graduates' successful transition to the labor market, who are already vulnerable to labor market shocks due to a dramatic increase in their number in the last decade. In this paper, we examine the gendered impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and related employment protection policies on the labor market outcomes of recent university graduates. We find that both males and females are less likely to be employed during the pandemic year, with more pronounced employment losses for females. While gender differences in employment arise from females' high skill employment losses, becoming discouraged workers and staying out of the labor force to invest in self-education led to higher inactivity for females.

We analyze the impact of an increase in compulsory schooling policy on the gender gap in intergenerational educational persistence using the Turkish Adult Education Survey (2012). Prior to the reform there is a gender gap in the association of parents' educational attainment with their offspring's. Daughters exhibit more intergenerational persistence than sons. We show that the education reform that increased compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years, exposed children born after 1986 to 3 more years of schooling and reduced the effect of parental education on the completion probability of new compulsory schooling (8 years) from 30% to 1% percentage points for sons and from 49% to 11% percentage points for daughters, while the effect of parental education on post-compulsory schooling outcomes of sons and daughters decreased by 12 and 13 percentage points, respectively. The gender gap in intergenerational education transmission has decreased by 8 percentage points in the completion of new compulsory schooling level but remains unchanged at the post-compulsory schooling level after the reform.

This paper investigates the effect of culture on female labor market outcomes using new micro-level data on two distinct Muslim denominations in Turkey: Sunni and Alevi Muslims. We find a positive and significant effect of being an Alevi Muslim on female labor force participation and employment probability compared to a Sunni Muslim whereas there are no significant differences in male labor market outcomes between the two denominations. We provide evidence that Alevi Muslims have more gender equal views regarding the role of women in the labor market and argue that differences in gender views drive the results.

We examine the dramatic expansion in the Turkish higher education system during 2006-2008, which resulted in the establishment of 41 new public universities and a 60% increase in the number of available slots. Using the variation in the exposure intensity of expansion across cohorts and regions, we estimate the causal effect of the expansion on overall attainment and the gender gap in higher education. Before the expansion, women had lower higher education rates. The expansion increased the attainment rates of both men and women but failed to reduce the gender gap. Comparing the scale of expansion across fields of study, we observe that the largest growth in available slots was in social sciences and engineering. The expansion of slots in social sciences benefited men and women evenly, but the expansion in engineering benefited men more than women, thereby raising the gender gap.

Over a century ago, Schumpeter (1911) described the entrepreneur as a creative, driven individual who finds new combinations of (factors) of production to develop a new product, corner a new market, or design a new technology and he famously attributed endogenous development to the creative acts associated with entrepreneurial activity. This paper contributes to the understanding of female entrepreneurship in Turkey by analyzing the patterns and characteristics of female entrepreneurs and examining time trends in entrepreneurial activity. The data on entrepreneurs comes from data on employers and own account workers available in nationally representative Turkish household labor force surveys of 2004-2012. In Turkey, share of self-employed was 38 percent of total employment in 2012, much higher than the European Union (EU) - 27 average of 15 percent. However, the composition of self-employed in Turkey is markedly different than in EU-27. Only 13 percent of self-employed in Turkey are employers in contrast to 28 percent of self-employed in EU-27. This study is the first analyzing the effects of socio-demographic characteristics such as education, marital status, number of children, and urban or rural location on gender gap in entrepreneurship in Turkey. A multinomial logistic model was used where the odds of being an employer or own account worker over being inactive and unemployed was analyzed. It is found that higher education reduces the gender gap while marriage and number of children increases the gender gap in entrepreneurship. Perhaps surprisingly, living in an urban area also increases the gender gap as it increases the odds of becoming an employer for males and decreases the odds for females. The first section gives introduction. The section section deals with a brief literature survey on gender gap in entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneur characteristics. In section three, the entrepreneurship setting for women in Turkey is described. Section four describes the data and methodology. Section five presents results.

We analyze the impact of an increase in compulsory schooling policy on the gender gap in intergenerational educational persistence using the nationally representative Turkish Adult Education Survey. Prior to the reform, there is a gender gap in the association of parents’ educational attainment with their ofspring’s. Daughters’ educational attainment is more dependent on their parents’ education background. We show that the education reform that increased compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years reduced the impact of parental education on completion of new compulsory schooling (8 years) and post-compulsory schooling (high school) for both sons and daughters. The gender gap in intergenerational education transmission has decreased by about 5 percentage points in the completion of new compulsory schooling level but remains unchanged at the post-compulsory schooling level after the reform. Heterogeneous effects of the reform indicate that mandating additional years of education is an ineffective intervention in the eastern regions with poorer economic conditions, larger rural population, and more traditional gender views in reducing the gender gap in educational mobility, even at the compulsory level of education.