Family Year balance sheet: 404,000 women stayed home for ‘family reasons’
The government's family-centered policies confine women to the roles of wife, mother, and caregiver, making them the most likely to give up their jobs and economic independence. In 2025, declared the ‘Year of the Family’, 404,000 women withdrew from working life for ‘family reasons’. Of these women, 174,000 are university graduates.
Employment models are turning women into a low-cost, insecure labor reserve needed by neoliberal policies. Policies centered on the family also reinforce the system that defines women as ‘spouses’, ‘mothers’, and ‘caregivers’. Their presence in the workplace is defined as ‘support for the family economy’. For this reason, women are expected to be the most likely to give up their jobs and economic independence.
Particularly in the absence of public and free nurseries for early childhood, the fact that private nursery prices are now comparable to the minimum wage leads many women to conclude, “Instead of working and giving my salary to a caregiver/nursery, I will take care of my child at home.” As the childcare crisis grows, eldercare is also emerging as a significant problem. As Turkey's population ages, elderly care is being placed on women's shoulders through methods such as “home care” rather than being institutionalized by the state.
In recent years, employment strategies have often emphasized “flexible working” and “remote working” models, usually presented with the promise of increasing women's employment. However, this paves the way for women to give up their professional lives and withdraw completely from the workforce “for family reasons” by “making women work without leaving the home,” “increasing their workload by intertwining housework with professional work.”
The Turkish Statistical Institute's (TÜİK) labor force data also reveals, in numbers, how the government's family-focused policies push women out of the labor market. As of 2025, 21 million 548 thousand women of working age are not included in the labor force. Of these women, 5,925,000 state that they are “busy with housework” as the reason for not being part of the labor force. In addition, 3,846,000 women cite “family and personal reasons” as the reason for not participating in working life. These two reasons together account for 9,771,000 women not being part of the labor force. In other words, 45% of women who are not working are not participating in the labor force due to household chores and family reasons. The number of women who could not work “due to family reasons,” which was 2.3 million in 2021, jumped to 3.8 million in 2025. Moreover, this situation has reached a striking point in the skilled female labor force. University graduates make up 806,000 of the women who do not participate in working life for family reasons. One in five women who do not participate in the workforce for family reasons are university graduates, who are part of the skilled workforce.
Conservative domination, which shifted into high gear after the 2023 elections, led to an explosion in 2024 and 2025. Over the past two years, more than one million women have given up looking for work or left their jobs for family reasons. In 2025, declared the ‘Year of the Family’, 404,000 women left the workforce for ‘family’ reasons. During this period, 174,000 university-educated women withdrew from the labor market for family reasons. While family reasons accounted for 11% of women not participating in the workforce in 2021, this rate rose to 18% in 2025. A more dramatic picture emerges when examined by age group. The age range of women points to the period when they have children and the burden of care is most intense.
By the end of 2025, 780,000 women aged 30-34 had left the workforce for family reasons. Women aged 35-39 followed with 645,000, and women aged 25-29 with 623,000. Two million 48 thousand women in the 25-39 age group, which is the most productive and progressive age group in the working life, cannot overcome family obstacles. TÜİK's birth statistics also point to the age of the mother at first birth as the age at which withdrawal from the workforce accelerates. The average age of mothers at first birth is calculated as 27.3. This average is 28.8 in Istanbul and exceeds 29 in some provinces.
Although the designation of 2025 as the “Year of the Family” is presented as a social policy initiative, the data proves that this policy has actually turned women into a “substitute” that covers the shortcomings of the welfare state and systematically removes them from the public sphere. The prescription for reversing this system, which forces women to become a ‘reserve labor force’ or ‘unpaid caregivers’ to cover the system's shortcomings, is for the women's movement to raise its voice and action against the ‘family-oriented siege’.
Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Aile Yılı bilançosu: 404 bin kadın ‘ailevi’ nedenle eve kapandı, published in BirGün newspaper on March 8, 2026.
