Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Depressive Symptom Severity of Employed and Unemployed Women in Turkey.

Introduction: Depression which is one of the mood disorders, causes a decrease in the work that requires participation during the day, and affects interpersonal relationships. It is known to be a fairly common mental disorder, especially among women. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate the effect of women's employment status on the severity of depressive symptoms in Turkey.

Method: We searched the databases of YÖK Thesis Center, ULAKBIM, Web of Science and Scopus to detect those studies aiming to compare the employed women with housewives in terms of the depressive symptoms measured with validated self-report scales in Turkish.

Results: Of the 283 studies reported in Turkish or English as an article or dissertation, 10 met the inclusion criteria for meta-analysis. The random effects meta-analysis conducted with R 4.0.1, meta and metafor package revealed a slight and statistically nonsignificant effect of the employment status on women's depressive scores (g=-0.13 95% Confidence Interval [CI] [-0.41, 0.14]). Heterogeneity between studies was estimated at a high level (I2=90.3% 95% CI [84.3%, 94%]). Results of the meta-regression analyses implied that neither the sample size (R2=0.00%) nor the publication year (R2=5.58%) were among the main sources the heterogeneity. The findings suggest that the risk of having depressive symptoms is nearly same in employed women as in housewives.

Discussion: Hence, employment status is unlikely to be among the main factors leading to relatively higher prevalence of depression among women.