Women take center stage at İstanbul summit

Progress made and goals yet unattained were reoccurring themes at the 2nd International Women Entrepreneurship and Leadership Summit last Thursday and Friday, which gathered experts from different fields to discuss issues facing women in Turkey and abroad.

Female Turkish entrepreneurs from İstanbul to Diyarbakır participated in the summit, organized by the Turkish Businesswomen and Industrialist’s Association (KAGİDER). With topics ranging from corporate policy to politics to religion and the household, the panel discussions at the conference drew enthusiastic audience-speaker interaction and addressed the problems of Turkish women from a broad perspective. Among the speakers were male and female corporate leaders, politicians, academics and other public figures from Turkey and other countries. Turkish Garanti Bank sponsored the summit, held at the Lütfi Kırdar Congress Center.

Delivering the summit’s opening speech on Friday, State Minister and chief EU negotiator Egemen Bağış noted the global problem of women’s inequality and indicated that Turkey’s EU bid was important in making progress on this issue domestically. “Our women should no longer be stuck between choosing to have children or build a career -- they should be able to do both,” he said.

The process that will address all of the expectations of different segments of Turkish society, bring them hope and gather them on common ground is the EU membership process, Bağış asserted. “While across the EU women’s participation in the workforce is at 55 percent, we [in Turkey] are at around one-fourth of this. We must absolutely boost this figure. The quickest route to solving this problem is by increasing the number of female employers and entrepreneurs,” he said.

Noting that more Turkish women support the EU bid at a higher rate than their male counterparts, Bağış noted the importance of women’s roles in shaping society and said that this led him to be hopeful about the future of the accession process. “Mentalities are changing in Turkey. ... It’s easier to establish dialogue now, and it’s for this reason that I support gatherings like this. I want to emphasize in particular that from now on, with KAGİDER we are going to continue our cooperation to make good use of the EU prescription in front of us so that our women can finally rise to the position they deserve in society,” he said.

“The fact that women in this country can finally say, even while arguing with their spouses, ‘I’ll take you to the European Court of Human Rights [ECtHR]’ is an indicator that we’ve come to a very important point in this country,” he said.

Entrepreneurship in action

Following Bağış’s remarks, the conference continued with panel discussions that lasted until Friday evening, interspersed with networking and question-and-answer sessions.

Topics discussed at the summit included women within the evolving world order, the role of women leaders in increasing women’s work force participation, women’s NGOs, the impact of females in diplomacy and more. While the first day of the conference focused more on the broader context of women’s roles and work in the modern world, the second day dealt with possibilities for ameliorating women’s problems and addressing issues of specific interest to women entrepreneurs, such as a session on environmental sustainability and corporate economics. In particular, a presentation by Nilgün Cılız, a faculty member at Boğaziçi University’s Environmental Sciences Institute, advised women entrepreneurs at the conference on ways to increase energy efficiency in their businesses and thus decrease overall costs.

The final panel discussion treated the topic of the effects of Islam upon the development of women and featured speakers Dr. Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University, İstanbul University Professor Fatmagül Berktay and journalist Ayşe Önal. During the session -- which was still under way when Sunday’s Zaman went to print -- the speakers emphasized the need to be able to distinguish culturalized aspects of religion while respecting the religious belief and non-belief of women as individuals.

Overall, there was a high level of audience-speaker interaction, with many women entrepreneurs in the audience posing questions and often weighing in with their own experiences. Despite audience representation from a broad geographical demographic, visibly conservative Turkish women and representatives of religiously affiliated women’s rights groups were noticeably absent from the summit hall.