In a not-so-recent column, I threw up my hands in horror to discover that the World Economic Forum (WEF) in its 2008 Global Gender Gap report had put Turkey in 123rd place (out of 130), the only bright note being that it was still ahead of Chad. The report looks at a variety of issues: health, education, status in the workplace and access to political power. Looking at the results for 2009, I discover that Turkey is in 128th place, below Egypt and Iran, but still one ahead of Saudi Arabia. I know we do not have to treat these international league tables with utter seriousness. They do not always compare like with like. If Turkey came in 68th place or even 82nd, it might shrug the whole thing off. But the situation is so humiliating it must at least give pause for thought. Turkey lingers in the “not even trying” bottom of the league of those countries (“upper middle income”) in the same per capita range and continues to punch disastrously below its weight when compared to the rest of Europe. And the strangest thing is, Turkey is desperately proud of the rights it has bestowed on women. As a society, it holds up the platonic ideal of gender equality and of women free to operate freely in the public realm. It is a society which goes into paroxysms when women in prominent positions threaten that ideal by keeping their heads covered with a kerchief, suggesting that either willingly or under social pressure they feel the need to keep their sexuality under wraps.
At the same time, it is a society happy to see its women disappear from productive, economic life and be sucked back into the home. Girls start out in near perfect ratio to boys when they begin primary school (0.98 -- with 1.0 representing total equality), then the figure goes down to 0.86 by secondary school then 0.76 by the time they are ready for university.
Again I am trying not to become blinded by the WEF numbers. That there is a gender gap does not mean that no women enjoy equal status with men or even that there is not a critical mass of independent women. There are many women at the top of the corporate tree. Ümit Boyner is poised to become head of Turkey’s largest (in terms of their share of the economy) business confederation, the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (TÜSİAD), and will succeed another woman, Arzuhan Doğan Yalçındağ. The obvious explanation is that even large corporations in Turkey are family controlled, and with the head start of an influential surname, women can succeed. Many women are prominent in the media and therefore very much in public view.
In so many walks of life, women are not there and their absence is not even noticed. I attended the opening of the 2010 European Capital of Culture gala the other night. While there were women performers on the stage, there were not that many in the audience. I spent much time while we waited for the protocol guests to take their front row seats and the lights to dim trying to calculate whether the number of women was over or below 20 percent.
I contemplated in a previous piece that in a society which sees itself as deeply polarized, the inferior status of women is the one subject in which both sides of the secularist divide seem happy to collude. I was half facetious, but now I am not so sure. Though not by nature the sort of person given to conspiracy, I sometimes wonder if the unwillingness by society to address this inequality is evidence of a plot so profound it makes the Ergenekon cabal seem the work of amateurs.
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