In the near future, education levels of women are expected to increase rapidly for all regions of Turkey. More and more educated women will aspire to be active in the formal labor market while having children at the same time. At the moment, with 30% on average, women's participation in the workforce is rather low in Turkey. We find that women’s probability of being employed is cut in half when having children in comparison to childless women.

Turkey is invited to endorse the targets of the Europe 2020 strategy, and to further empower women to have increased access to education and be more actively involved in the labor market. A commitment to raising female employment rates in Turkey in line with the European Employment Strategy would not only increase gender equality and enhance macroeconomic growth due to a rising talent pool (Klasen, 1999, 2002), but female employment also helps to combat social exclusion and child poverty by stabilizing family income.

However, the existing negative impact of female employment on fertility in Turkey risks holding back affirmative action towards female employment. Yet, there are hints that this strategy risks being counterproductive, at least in the middle and long run: Comparing our descriptive and empirical results to those of other European countries reveals that those countries which succeeded in re-increasing fertility rates back to replacement levels are mostly the ones with increasing female employment rates, offering institutional support for parents to combine work and family life (Luci-Greulich and Thévenon, 2013, 2014).

Work-life balance policies, like those that have already proven to be effective in Nordic countries and in France (where fertility levels are around replacement level and converge with families’ fertility intentions), emerge as an optimum solution: while higher workforce participation of women will increase family resources, thus enabling couples to realize their fertility intentions, family policies encouraging women to combine work and family life are likely to avoid decreases in fertility which may emerge if women substitute childbearing against employment.

This suggests that in Turkey, enabling parents to have the number of children they wish to have by reducing barriers to child arrival would allow maintaining fertility levels above replacement. Our analysis shows that at the moment, qualified women who succeed in returning back to the labor market after the arrival of a first or second child are particularly at risk of deciding against an additional child. Reducing existing barriers which hinder these women having children and at the same time being successfully integrated in the formal labor market seems thus a major challenge in Turkey.

The paper is organized as follows: Section two gives contextual information about fertility and female employment in Turkey, while section three provides a descriptive overview of trends in fertility and female employment while taking into account interactions with education and regional background. Section four presents results of our micro econometric analysis of the impact of women’s activity status on child arrival by distinguishing between ranks. Section five highlights our main findings by comparing them to those found for other European countries, which allows discussing some policy implications.

**2. Contextualization: Fertility and female employment in Turkey**

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