The Directorate on the Status of Women (KSGM) has just published a report that gives a good overview of where women stand today in Turkish society. In a few areas, women have made some headway. At university level, girls account for 43 percent of students, and in specific sectors of employment, such as the banking sector or academia, women are present in growing numbers, even if few of them reach the top echelons.The broader picture, unfortunately, is not so encouraging. Far from catching up with other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members and narrowing the gap with the European Union average of 60 percent female labor force participation, female involvement in the workforce in Turkey is still declining. From 34.1 percent in 1990, it has dropped to 21.6 percent, and this low ratio includes women who work for free in family businesses or toil in the fields with no say on how the money will be spent. The 29.6 percent target set in the 9th Development to be reached by 2013 is still far away.
Urbanization only partly explains the continuing trend. Women from the countryside, with lower education levels, undoubtedly have more limited job opportunities in the cities than their better educated sisters. But societal perceptions and structural obstacles also stand in their way.
The women’s wing of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) recently organized a seminar to find out what were the major obstacles to women’s work. Lack of affordable child and elderly care, as usual, figured among the top complaints, as did sexual harassment in the work place, which legal amendments have so far failed to curtail. Men often mention the risk women face if they travel to work alone as a reason for keeping their wives at home, but it becomes as self-fulfilling prophecy as long as society considers that women out alone, especially after nightfall, must be up to no good and are therefore fair game for harassment. Unnecessary legal provisions, such as requiring employers to give their female employees five days leave during their periods -- as if menstruating were an illness -- do little to encourage them to add women to the payroll.
The social security structure also encourages women, who often drop out of the work force when they marry or have children, to remain dependent on their fathers or husbands rather than sign up for benefits. Women workers are often unregistered: It is bad for them because it leaves them unprotected, and it is bad for the country as a whole since their production is not subject to taxation.
The notion that women could help Turkey increase its productivity and competitiveness is still not widely accepted in political circles. Men fear that women will steal jobs that, by right, should be theirs since they are the breadwinners.
The AK Party is said to consider a clause allowing for positive discrimination among constitutional amendments it plans to unveil later this month. This would be a step in the right direction, but a comprehensive approach has yet to be devised to improve gender balances.
Politicians rarely speak publicly about the need to get more women involved in public life. Their actions, across the political spectrum, are even less encouraging. The head of the CHP Women’s Wing in the İzmir province, Gülşen Koşanoğlu, for instance, has just expressed her frustration in the media after the party failed to include a single woman among 48 candidates who ran at a recent party congress in her province.
In most countries, young politicians take their first public steps at the local level before turning to national politics. In Turkey, however, women fare even worse at the municipal and provincial level than they do in the national Parliament. Since 2007, the Turkish Parliament counts 9.1 percent of women, but how often do these 50 legislators, or even the two women who sit in the Cabinet, grab the headlines? In the local elections that took place in March last year, women only gained 0.42 percent of seats on municipal councils and only 27 of Turkey’s 2,948 mayors (0.9 percent) are women. If local authorities are meant to act as incubators for tomorrow’s national politicians, prospects for greater female involvement do not appear very bright.
