The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we review the literature that can help us position the issue analytically and discuss how it gets translated into practical policy analysis. Our review differs from a traditional literature survey to the extent that we are highly selective in choosing from among a vast literature on women’s empowerment. We specifically do not address issues of political empowerment, nor do we deal with important issues of voice and agency that have been dealt with in other papers, such as World Bank (2014). We proceed to examine alternative ways of thinking about the problem of _low female labor force participation_ and argue that the gender-enhanced growth diagnostics provides an analytically rigorous, effective, and politically attractive approach to tackling the problem of female economic exclusion. In section 3, we outline an approach for combining gender and growth analyses in a ‘gender-enhanced’ growth diagnostics that can be used to identify the constraints to growth by focusing explicitly on the impediments to female economic participation in developing economies. The approach enables us to prioritize the binding constraints to economic growth in terms of their importance for closing gender gaps in economic participation. Through this mechanism, it is possible to find complementarities between national growth diagnostics and women’s empowerment initiatives, increasing the chances for their joint success and potential mutual benefits. Looking simply at areas in which women lag behind men (i.e., gender gap analysis), while manifestly useful, does not prioritize according to the economic importance of the constraint, nor does it connect the constraint to other limitations in the economy that impede women’s economic progress. Section 4 operationalizes the approach using the case of Turkey and can serve as a guide for policy makers and advisors who seek to apply the approach to other countries. We acknowledge however that how we apply this approach varies depending on available data and country circumstances. We offer concluding remarks in section 5.

# **2. The Literature on Gender and Growth Diagnostics**

Our approach builds on two important strands of the development literature. The first, as encapsulated by Dufflo (2012), stakes out the position that gender-specific policy interventions are needed to break cycles of inadequate economic opportunity, overt or implicit discrimination, and the neglect of women’s potential contributions to individual, household and national economic welfare. As Duflo (2012) notes, the process of development is too slow to await improvements in women’s economic empowerment, while at the same time, the virtuous cycle between interventions to help women’s rights and development gains is also insufficiently robust; hence “this suggests that neither economic development nor women’s empowerment is the magic bullet it is sometimes made out to be.”<sup>6</sup> The literature, as reviewed by Milazzo and Goldstein (2011) and carefully documented by the World Bank’s World Development Report (World Bank, 2012), and supported subsequently by regional and country specific work, particularly on Africa, has

> 6 Duflo (2012), op. cit. p.1076.

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