Essays on education inequality of women in Turkey

Despite advances in women's educational attainment in Turkey over the past 50 years, improvements in persistent inequality cohorts, lower intergenerational mobility and unequal opportunities in transition have remained important. This dissertation consists of three essays examining inequalities at the interface between demographic change and the educational level of women. Each essay has its own introduction, methods, results and conclusions. The essays have one thing in common that they are based on data from the TDHS 2013 and differ in their approach to the demographic perspective. In the first essay I examined the development of educational inequality in the women's cohorts in Turkey. Using non-parametric and parametric methods, I have found that the relationship between early life circumstances and women's education levels has not weakened over time. In addition to the inequality of opportunity, changes in the socio-economic composition of the population across the cohorts are also driving the result. In the second essay, I examined the divergent paths of young women in transition to adulthood in relation to education and employment. Despite the decreasing gender gap in schooling at all levels, labor force participation is still low, which increases the NEET rate. The results show that inactivity status is not only related to early life circumstances, but also to preferences and efforts. In the third essay, I examined intergenerational educational mobility between mothers and daughters using conventional and demographic methods. Mobility has not improved in the older cohorts. Affected by the most recent educational reforms, the younger daughters show greater mobility, the extent of which has been dampened by assortative mating and increased by differences in fertility.