ABSTRACT

Research shows that women’s employment is key to their empowerment and promoting gender equality in the labor force. At the national development level, it is a broadly accepted view that gender equality positively affects economic growth. There is however less strong support for the view that economic growth is sufficient to directly promote gender equality. As a result, governments often design policies that specifically address gender issues in an effort to complement broader goals for national development. In this chapter, we will look at the current employment policies of two countries, Turkey and South Africa, and review the extent to which these policies promote women’s inclusion in the workforce. The chapter will therefore also look at the intersection between national development, employment policy, and women’s economic inclusion with a focus on the opportunities that the policies in each country create as well as the constraints they neglect, which in turn determine their effectiveness in including (and empowering) women.