By Nazlan Ertan
Bakım, or care, is one of those deceptively soft words, the sugar coating over a complex vitamin pill, a soft towel draped over the hard machinery of an economy. It suggests tenderness and love. What it rarely suggests is exhaustion, lost income, or the quiet arithmetic of inequality.
I saw both versions in the same week, between March 16 and 23. At a conference jointly organized by the Embassy of Sweden and the EU Delegation, with support from UN Women, Turkish and international participants agreed on what is by now an established fact: care responsibilities remain one of the main barriers to women’s participation in the economy. Women spend nearly three times as much time on care as men, and the work remains undervalued and underpaid.
Turkish media has begun to register the cost. As Numedya24 reported in 2025, “hundreds of thousands of women leave the workforce each year due to family-related reasons,” a phrase that quietly folds childcare, eldercare, and household labor into a single, convenient explanation.
NO BAYRAM JOY
Then came Bayram. No panels, just practice. Women moving between kitchen and guests, elders and children, trays and expectations. But also something less visible: the mental load, the running list of who will be visited, what will be served, what is missing, what must not be forgotten. Men, supportive, occasionally helpful, largely orbiting the scene. If the conference offered consensus, Bayram offered confirmation. Even in liberal households, Bayrams, like summer houses, revolve around female labor. What we politely call tradition is, in effect, the care economy at work, unpaid, unmeasured, and almost entirely female. Of course, no single Bayram explains why women leave the workforce. But taken together, these rituals show how the burden is learned, repeated, and normalised.
The more troubling part is not that we do not know, because we do. We have seen female colleagues lose seniority or entire careers when they “stopped for a while” to care for children and struggled to return. Two of my friends took early retirement to look after elderly relatives. My husband, an ophthalmologist, sees another side of this equation: elderly patients cared for by unskilled, often semi-legal migrant workers. The arrangement cuts both ways. To paraphrase Maryse Guimond, country director for UN Women, it neither upholds the dignity and rights of the caregiver nor those of the care recipient.
CARE AS PART OF THE ECONOMY
Care has been studied, measured, theorised, and debated. It has even been named correctly: an economy. COVID-19 briefly made this impossible to ignore. When schools closed and care systems faltered, the burden did not disappear; it moved home, and it multiplied. And yet, as one speaker noted with some impatience, the issue is neither data nor awareness; it is that institutions fail to act together.
And the data, by now, is difficult to ignore. According to recent ILO-backed projections for Turkey, care is not a marginal issue but a looming structural one. By 2030, the country is expected to need around 1.6 million additional care workers under a mid-range scenario, driven by both childcare and rapidly expanding eldercare needs. To reach full coverage aligned with international standards, that number rises further. Today’s system is operating at roughly half that capacity.
The gaps are already visible. Only a small fraction of children under three have access to formal childcare, far below European averages. Elder care services remain limited, even as the population ages and dependency ratios climb. Meanwhile, a large share of care work continues informally, often without training, pay security, or social protection.
What this produces is a cycle. Limited services push care back into the household. The household assigns it to women. Women reduce or exit paid work. Income falls, informality rises, and the system remains underbuilt. One constraint feeds the next.
…AND SOLUTIONS
Yet the same data points to opportunity. Investments in care are among the highest job multipliers in the economy, outperforming construction and even parts of the green transition. Care is not simply a cost, it is infrastructure that generates employment, supports productivity, and stabilises societies. Or, put more plainly, economies do not run despite care, but through it.
There is also no shortage of solutions. Expand childcare and eldercare. Treat care as infrastructure, not family goodwill. Encourage fathers to take leave and ensure they actually do. Formalise care work, value it properly, pay it fairly, and bring it under social protection. Invest in pre-school education and workplace childcare. Train carers. Build systems that assume care is a shared responsibility, not a private sacrifice.
None of this is novel. Variations of it have been tested, funded, piloted. Since 2007, the European Union alone has supported over 270 projects here on women’s economic participation, with more than €140 million in funding. Thousands of women have entered the workforce through such programmes. The care economy has long been a focal point for both the EU and UN Women.
And still, the centre of gravity remains unchanged. Because care is not only a sectoral issue, it is a litmus test of what we want our economy to be. Is it human-centred? Is it equitable? Does it reflect values such as gender equality and non-discrimination?
Or does it become part of a conservative agenda that places home-based labor squarely on women’s shoulders, under the assumption that a rigid division of roles protects and strengthens the family?
A century ago, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk warned that a nation cannot progress if half its population is held back, a point echoed at the panel by acting EU Delegation Chargé d’Affaires Jurgis Vilčinskas. The question lingers, uncomfortably current, including in the care economy.
So bakım continues to circulate as a virtue, something warm and noble. But stripped of sentiment, it is also labor: essential, constant, unevenly assigned and unfairly paid.
If care is as indispensable as everyone agrees, then why is it still treated as if it costs nothing and the one who gives it is stripped of material value and even professional dignity?
Until that changes, Bayram will keep offering its annual reminder of this imbalance, served, as always, on a carefully balanced tray of sweets.
