Women’s murders and the interaction between gender (in)equality and economic development: a subnational analysis in Turkey

Why are women’s murders (femicide) more common in some localities than in others? This paper addresses this question in the context of Turkey, a country with a high and rising number of women’s murders. It uses province-level data between 2010-2017 and the Negative-Binomial estimator to explore the importance of several socio-economic, cultural, and political factors. It finds that a province’s ethnic composition, divorce rate, gender equality in education, and level of economic development are significant predictors of women’s murders. The main result is that whether economic development reduces femicide depends on other factors: in poorer provinces, there is a strong positive correlation between women’s murders and equality in education and divorce rates, but in richer provinces, these associations are significantly weaker. These results are consistent with the idea that economic development may not reduce women’s murders by itself, but it can mitigate the effects of male backlash against women who challenge the status quo. The main policy implication of this study is that pro-development policies may save more lives if they target those poorer provinces that also carry these additional risk factors.