Gender inequalities, capital deepening and trade in Turkey's manufacturing sector 1990-2001

This dissertation analyzes the effects of technological change, capital intensity and increased trade activity on the gender/skill differentiated employment in the trade-related subsectors of the Turkish manufacturing industry during the 1990-2001 period. The primary objective is to find out the changes in relative employment opportunities for women workers as industries respond to increased international competition by pursuing the high road of increasing productivity. I use the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) method to examine the determinants of skill/gender-/intensity of employment. The data are from annual manufacturing surveys for private establishments that employ ten or more employees in sectors disaggregated at the ISIC three-digit level. I find evidence in support of capital-skill complementarity during the 1990-2001 period. Capital deepening, however, did not have gender neutral employment effects. Specifically, I find that for the manufacturing industry as a whole capital had a preference for skilled males over skilled females controlling for the effects of trade. When I focus on the individual sectors, however, I find that some sectors had skilled-male labor complementarity with capital while some of them had skilled-female labor complementarity.