ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 focuses on the employment policies of women over the last two decades. This chapter demonstrates that the AKP’s employment policies are marked with a continuation of, and a departure from, previous periods. The continuity has to do with the fact that the neoliberal policies that began in the early 1980s and intensified during the 1990s were enhanced and institutionalized under the AKP. The AKP not only kept promises to international organizations to intensify neoliberal policies, particularly in the area of labor, but also took extra steps in legislating new policies that fundamentally shaped the labor market. However, the AKP policies also diverge from the policies of previous periods. The divergence comes from the AKP’s main concern with female employment, which is to draw women into the labor market while strengthening their traditional roles through constant references to tradition and religion. An inevitable implication of this commitment is that women are employed in low-paying, low-status informal jobs in their own homes or in segregated areas and that they receive no social security benefits. The empirical data in fact demonstrate unequivocally that both male and female unemployment has increased since 2002, with the increase higher for women despite the increasing percentages of total employment for men and women. The increase mostly took place in part-time and informal sector jobs.
