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Abstract

Today, many women are excluded from the labor market despite having a good education. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this situation is the gender-based division of labor. Because of this division of labor, women are mostly considered to be responsible for domestic work and care work and it becomes difficult for them to go out of the house. Such women are not able to participate in the labor market due to their domestic responsibilities and are currently considered inactive. Economic inactivity, a huge problem for many European countries including Turkey, excludes a great potential human resource that will be productive for the economy if more women work.

Many countries offer different solutions to solve the inactivity problem. The health crisis caused by the COVID-19 epidemic has also led people to work more flexibly and at home. The VirtualCall Project, which received grant support from the European Union, is one of these solution proposals.2 This project aims to involve inactive women as home call center workers through simultaneous distance training in the listed countries with a consortium formed with the participation of partner institutions from Turkey, Spain, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The main purpose of this project is to diversify women’s employment in line with the needs of the labor market and to create new employment opportunities for women within the scope of a comprehensive training program. The aims of this study are to draw attention to the economic inactivity problem of women, which is the result of the gender-based division of labor, and to introduce the VirtualCall Project as a solution proposal. In line with this purpose, economic inactivity will be defined, then the division of labor based on gender will be discussed, and suggestions for solutions will be put forward.

Author Biography

Ebru Işık is a feminist economist and Assistant Professor at Sinop University, Turkey. E-mail: eikutuk@sinop.edu.tr, ORCID: 0000-0001-6001-527X.

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