Industrialisation Strategies and Gender Composition of Manufacturing Employment in Turkey

During the past decade, the literature on women and development as well as the literature on the new international division of labour have frequently emphasised the growing share of female employment in manufacturing under export-led industrialisation. Many authors have documented the often repressive conditions of women’s employment (Elson and Pearson, 1981; Nash and Fernandez-Kelly, 1983), some characterising this industrialisation strategy as ‘female-led industrialisation’ (Joekes, 1982), others as a process of ‘bloody taylorization’ (Lipietz, 1987, pp. 75-6). Beyond an appreciation of the repressive working conditions, these conceptualisations include widely accepted characterisations of women’s location in manufacturing employment. It is held as a near-axiomatic truth that in the current phase of the international division of labour, Third World countries specialise in labour intensive production of commodities with low skill content, and women constitute a high proportion of the labour force in these sectors. Such characterisations of women’s employment raise the question of whether these characteristics are peculiar to export-led industrialisation or are more general features of women’s employ-ment in the industrialisation process.