Female Entrepreneurship in Turkey

Abstract

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.