Does gender discrimination contribute to low labor force participation of women in turkey ? : evidence from survey and field data

Abstract EN

Low female labor force participation continues to be an important problem in the Turkish labor market.

Labor market participation of women might be worsened by the cultural and traditional factors, such as the division of labor in the household, or economic factors, such as discrimination against females.

In this paper, we try to identify hiring stage differences among men and women via a correspondence audit methodology.

In doing so, we produce two new measures of employer response in addition to the standard callback measure used in the literature.

We show that employers treat male and female applicants’ resumes similarly prior to the callback stage.

However, there is weak but positive discrimination against female applicants in the Turkish labor market.

Hence, hiring stage discrimination does not contribute to the low female labor force participation in Turkey