Econ Seminar: Hülya Canbakal & Alpay Filiztekin

Hülya Canbakal and Alpay Filiztekin will present their paper entitled " Interregional differences in gender inequality: sex ratios in the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey: 1897-1965" on Wednesday, 1st  of June between 11:45 and 13:00. The seminar will take place at FASS 2034 and can be joined through the following link:

https://sabanciuniv.zoom.us/j/8974991950

Abstract

This study aims to compare child sex ratios in the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey in order to identify changes and continuities, and to explore the possible determinants of regional diversity. Even though the phenomenon of ‘missing girls/women’, identified for the first time in the 1990s by Amartya Sen in the context of Asia, has come to be considered as one of the fundamental components of gender inequality, it is only recently that the topic has attracted attention in scholarship on other parts of the world. Our project seeks to locate the territory of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey in the map of ‘missing girls’ in western Eurasia, and link the two demographic regimes to one another through patterns of sex ratios using census data and other demographic records. Preliminary findings of the study indicate that the Ottoman and Republican lands fit in the pattern of high sex ratios common in some parts of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Mean ratios ‘normalized’ in Turkey in the 1950s, but there was a high degree of interregional diversity within both regimes, and sex ratios tended to increase geographically eastwards. In order to explore the possible causes of these differences, we test some demographic, economic and cultural variables as development proxies, and find that the results are not unidirectional.