The picture it paints is not that the position of women has deteriorated under the current Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government; rather and simply that it hasn’t improved either. Even so, the findings should strike a raw nerve in the self-perception of a party whose Turkish acronym stands for “justice” and “development.”The number of women the study says are in top management jobs in government -- just over 12 percent of the total -- again is no worse than the comparable figure for Germany and slightly better, according to the report’s authors, than the position of women in Australia. The number of women in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy (some 26 percent) represents a slight fall from previous years. The more unsettling finding, based on detailed interviews with a stratified random sample of some 20 women, is that the women in the workforce are still discriminated against -- that many of their male colleagues entertain attitudes about which Western feminists were complaining of three decades ago, and that secular women in particular were conscious of a sense of making AK Party appointees feel uncomfortable. They felt that the men wanted to see “covered” women in their stead.
It is already a telling comment on official attitudes that statistical findings are based on government statistics of which the government department heads were themselves unaware. The researchers manage to illicit them through parliamentary questions. The report asks the civil service to install a permanent mechanism to monitor gender bias, and it is a call the current government would do well to heed. If there is one criticism one hears about the present government more than any other, is about its mistrust of those outside its own circle. This is not a unique characteristic -- most administrations have a bias towards their own partisans -- but the circumstances of the rise to power of the AK Party reinforces the natural suspicion of those outside its own movement. It is a party which was born from the ashes of two previous parties that were closed down by the courts for “violating the principles of the secular republic.”
The AK Party from its inception denies the title “Islamist.” Any foreign correspondent who was looking to get into an argument around the time of the last election only had to use the word “Islamic,” “Islamic leaning,” or a score of other synonyms in reference to the party to get an angry call. There is little dispute that although the AK Party was pointing in a political direction very different from the two parties, it succeeded by being pro-Europe, anti-protectionist and reliant on the guidance of the IMF. However, it did so from, shall we say, its core “pious constituency.” Most AK Party politicians continue to take care to respect the “body language” of Islamic politics, and it is the role of women in society which continues to make them vulnerable. I have never heard anyone say Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should not be president because he doesn’t like to drink. He does, however, face objections that his wife, along with the wives of many of his ministers, choose to keep their heads covered.
The fear is that the AK Party is happy to ask secularists vote for them but is reluctant to share decision making with those outside their own circle, of which women are in the preponderance. The AK Party says with reason that covered women have been subjected to gross discrimination -- even denied the right to higher education by failing a secularist dress code. The report “Does Islam Create a New Glass Ceiling” suggests that even at an unconscious level AK Party appointees are capable of mirroring this prejudice.The real test of the AK Party’s centrist credentials are not just who votes for it, but the caliber of its top recruits for running the nation’s affairs. That only 12 percent of these people are women is an admission of failure.
