WHY EARN LESS? Gender-based Factors Affecting the Earnings of Self-Employed Women in Turkey

Article to be published by JAI Press in a volume titled Middle Eastern Women and Work and edited by the Middle East Economic Association The opinions expressed in this paper belong to the author and do not represent any institution. Women for the past three years. Her research and program work have been in the fields of international political economy, institutional economics, and gender and economic development. In the last decade, she has collaborated and consulted with a range of institutions including UN agencies (UNIFEM, UNICEF, World Bank), USAID, host country governments, international and local NGOs, women's organizations and networks. She has written and published articles on impact of globalization on women's employment, microenterprise development (business development services), engendering macroeconomics (public Abstract This study, based on the author's Ph.D. dissertation carrying the same title and completed in December 1996, looks into the determinants of earnings differences between men and women among the urban self-employed in Turkey. It argues that in addition to human capital variables, there are social and institutional factors, which affect earnings of self-employed men and women. Some of these are gender-based factors, affecting women's earnings only. It also emphasizes that the earnings of an individual do not result from free and rational choices. Since women are not really expected to choose to concentrate in low-return, labor-intensive tasks, these choices are more likely to be made within the context of uneven economic development and pre-existing gender inequalities. This study attempts to explain the gender-based earnings gap by taking into account the interaction between economic factors and prevailing social and institutional structures such as the links between women's market and non-market work. The self-employed who are the focus of this study are urban lower middle-class and working-class women and men involved in a set of productive and service activities who would be unable to find employment in the formal markets and must generate their own employment with relatively little access or no access to capital, depending mainly on their labor. This study was based on a comprehensive 1995 survey of 705 women and men entrepreneurs in Turkey collected by the author and a team of researchers. The results show that five gender-based factors-marital status, ratio of time on non-market work over market work, childcare arrangements, location of business, and working in most-traditional sectors-were significant for the women's subsets of the data. Being married, having others take care of children …