The Gender Gap in the Use of Financial Services in Turkey

The reach of the financial sector in Turkey is wide - as measured by account penetration, use of electronic payments, and credit card ownership - relative to both developing and high-income countries. The gender gap in Turkey for account ownership is 49 percentage points, the highest rate among all middle-income countries. This paper discusses environmental factors that may help explain the significantly low use of financial services by women in Turkey. The authors explore reasons for the large gender gap in financial inclusion in Turkey and find that female workplace participation is an important factor in explaining financial inclusion among women. Men are more than three times as likely as women to report using an account to receive money from work and or the government. This paper is organized as follows: section one gives introduction. Section two summarizes account ownership and usage in Turkey. Section three analyzes formal and informal saving rates, section four discusses the use of formal and informal credit and the high use of store credit cards. Section five examines gender differences in enterprise financing.