YELDA YÜCEL was born in Turkey in 1971. She graduated from Economics Department of Bogazici University, Istanbul in 1993 and continued with MA and PhD studies in the same department. At the beginning of her PhD study in 1997, started in Economic Research Department at Yapı Kredi Bank (YKB), as an Assistant Economist. Research Team of YKB was newly established at that time, headed by the former Vice President of Central Bank of Turkey, Mr. Hasan Ersel. Yelda worked there for more than eleven years, where she was promoted to the position of Senior Economist in the meantime. Her studies in YKB centered on macro economic developments in Turkey and the global economy. Her PhD thesis was on balance of payments of Turkey from 1923 to 2002, which also fed her studies in YKB in the field of international trade and balance of payments issues.

Her interest in gender goes back to university years, during when she was part of a feminist group in the campus. Between 2000 and 2007, Yelda was a voluntary correspondent and writer in the monthly and later quarterly feminist magazine, Pazartesi. This magazine has been the longest feminist periodical in Turkey (having been published for more than 10 years), which created a movement especially in the second half of 1990s. She attended Bejing+5 Follow-Up Session in New York, as the representative of Pazartesi Magazine in 2000; participated in the Civil Code campaign in 2001. Later in recent years, she participated in “Women and Societies in Transition” conferences and workshops held by the feminist organization Amazone in Brussel, Belgium.

Outside her professional work, she has tried to combine macroeconomics and gender issues. For this purpose, she wrote occasional articles about women and economics in periodicals, newspapers, feminist periodicals such as Amargi (Women’s Academy) and women’s magazine of Petrol-Is (Union in petroleum products industry). She was also a member of the Advisory Board of the women’s supplement of Gundem newspaper, which mostly targeted Kurdish people, and contributed to this paper with news and occasional articles. Most recently she is a member of KEIG (The Initiative For Women's Labor and Employment), which was founded in February 2007. It is a platform of NGOs, academics, local authorities, labor unions and semi-public institutions to promote gender perspective in labor and employment issues.