With neoliberal policies, wrong decisions, inept moves and a preference for wealth transfer, the economic crisis is becoming permanent, while poverty is spreading and deepening. Although large segments of society are affected, this process touches everyone with a violence proportional to the nature of the “disadvantage” caused by structural problems. Seeing this violence and identifying its source requires a special effort and political will. Yes, poverty is increasing, but women's share of this acceleration is even greater.Women feel gender-based discrimination in the labor market at every stage, from job search to working conditions, from office life to unemployment. The victimizations that diversify with advancing age are completely invisible despite affecting millions of women. Kadın İşçi (Woman Worker, www.kadinisci.org) provides valuable journalism that focuses its editorial line on women's labor. The Women Workers' Solidarity Association, which created the website, recently announced a report titled “Gender-Based Discrimination Faced by Women Over 50 in the Field of Paid Labor and Solution Suggestions” and addressed the invisibility of this field. So what do women over 50 do?
As youth unemployment is at the highest percentages in history, what is striking in the graphs is the incredible increase in the unemployment of young women. The rate has risen from one in three to almost one in two; all young people face the barrier of experience, but young women face an even more insurmountable wall.
Women feel gender-based discrimination in the labor market at every stage, from job search to working conditions, from office life to unemployment. The victimizations that diversify with advancing age are completely invisible despite affecting millions of women. Kadın İşçi (Woman Worker, www.kadinisci.org) provides valuable journalism that focuses its editorial line on women's labor. The Women Workers' Solidarity Association, which created the website, recently announced a report titled “Gender-Based Discrimination Faced by Women Over 50 in the Field of Paid Labor and Solution Suggestions” and addressed the invisibility of this field. So what do women over 50 do?
Cheap labor reserve
Ageism is a general issue, also quoted in the report: According to OECD data for 2022, the employment gap between 54-64 year-olds and 24-54 year-olds in Turkey is close to 30 percent. Yes, young people cannot find jobs on the grounds of inexperience, but those who have left their youth behind are also excluded from employment with crude discrimination, assuming that they do not understand work, are too low intelligence to understand new technologies and socialities, and are physically weak. While Turkey has been on an aging trend in line with the global trend, while precarious work is increasingly becoming the norm, while the retirement age is pushed as far as possible and pensions are kept at a low point far from the realities of life, women over the age of 50 are experiencing all these more severely. In fact, this political and economic landscape increases their difficulties as they are seen as cheap labor reserves.
This research is centered around interviews with 24 women over the age of 50 from Istanbul, Bursa, Antalya and Kütahya. Thirteen of these women were able to retire, and six of them are not able to retire. At the time of the interviews, 17 of them were working and the remaining seven were looking for work. Among them are teachers, cleaning workers, executive assistants, housewives, driving instructors, bakers, modelits, furniture makers, business managers, bankers, environmental engineers, graphic designers, and sales representatives.
In general, women's first entry into employment is influenced by the men in their lives - fathers, brothers, husbands, lovers - and women even start working against this pressure. Due to the precariousness and flexibilization in various sectors, women also feel uneasy after turning 50. In fact, depending on the sector, the effect of age on the process of finding a job for women starts at the age of 35. Sometimes they are not hired directly because they are no longer considered young and beautiful enough, and sometimes there are other excuses. Women over 50, who are the focus of the research, face mobbing more frequently; realistic concerns about not being able to find a new job lead to accepting all conditions. One woman describes it like this: “In order to reduce costs, I did the work of those who were laid off for a year. I had all the work such as correspondence, accounting, banking, and I had to do additional work because my salary was not enough. I would come very early in the morning, do the work of two different workplaces, clean, prepare tea and coffee, and start my own work before the shift started. As a third job, I cleaned the stairs, elevator and building door, and the floor of the business building where we were located in the mornings and on weekends. As a fourth job, I cleaned the windows of another institution once a month.”
Their skills, education and experience are always put on the back burner, which leads women to feel inadequate and worthless for no reason. Apart from the employer or their representatives, other employees can behave in the same way. Zülal, a 56-year-old graphic designer, describes this mobbing well: “Every time there is such superiority, such know-it-allism, such pacification. It is also very difficult to make them accept you. I mean, the man is maybe half my age, but he is trying to teach me the job.”
Zülal endures all this to be able to retire. The problem that many women from different sectors face is that it is now a miracle to find an insured job when you are over 50. This puts additional strain on women who are close to being eligible for retirement. Women who are able to receive a pension, as is often the case, receive the lowest salary that is currently unaffordable due to their underpaid premiums. This pushes women who have taken a break from working to look for work again, some even entering the workforce for the first time in their lives. What is deemed worthy for a woman “at this age” is mostly service sector or cleaning work, informally of course. The fact that women outlive men pushes them into the same cycle when the salaries they inherit from their husbands are not enough.
Seedling flowers
Of course, having a job of one kind or another goes hand in hand with care work at home. Apart from the invisible household chores, there may be children to take care of, and sometimes they also take care of their own parents or relatives who are sick or elderly. After the 40s, the health problems that affect everyone, men and women, have to be pushed to the background if you are a women worker, women are left alone during menopause, and they experience the sexism of working life more severely with the effects of this period. As one woman explained, they become isolated, cut off from social life, nutrition and cultural exchanges for financial reasons:
“... when we are young we always dream that our life will be like this, like that. You think the future will be more beautiful. (...) We have not been able to live those beauties. We have become more and more passive, more withdrawn, our environment has shrunk, less and less. You mean this, you mean living? It is really debatable. Yes, we live. We are people with a positive outlook on life. We are trying to make our lives a little more colorful by taking care of two flowers and growing them as seedlings, not buying them from the market. But this is not living.”
All this cannot be seen without looking at the crisis and poverty from a gender perspective. You can read the report and recommendations written by Helin Metin at the following address.
