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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in his statement on the occasion of International Women's Day, emphasized the importance of achieving gender equality in work and politics, adding, “I ask every prime minister I meet, how many female ministers do you have in your government?”
He was clearly reminding us of perhaps the only law-like finding of the social sciences which says that societies are developed in direct proportion to the scale of women's participation in economic and political life. The more civilized societies tend to have an equal number of women and men in government. It is surely a pity that there is only one female minister in Turkey's current government.
On International Women's Day, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called on all mothers and women in Turkey to raise their voices in support of the current peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to end its armed insurgency. He said, “When you [mothers] say stop, God willing, all stops.” He is right. It is surely necessary that women's voices are heard and listened to if problems are to be solved. There is no doubt that under the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government led by Erdoğan, women's rights have substantially improved. (See “Sex and power in Turkey,” European Stability Initiative, 2007.) It does not suffice, however, that women have equal rights. It is equally necessary that women have equal say and equal respect with men in both family and society. The conservative mentality that restricts the social role of women to getting married and bearing children, to being a good wife and mother, does not, however, allow for an equal say and respect for women.
The world average for the proportion of women in parliaments is around 18 percent. This proportion has risen to 14 percent in Turkey only in the last general election. The lowest rate of participation in the labor force among women is about 55 percent in the European Union, whereas only 30 percent in Turkey. The proportion of women representatives in Parliament has nearly tripled during the last 10 years under the AK Party government. The schooling rate for girls has gone up to roughly equal that of boys, with 100 percent in primary, 65 percent in secondary and 35 percent in higher education. The rate of economic activity and wage-earning employment among women is also on the rise. It has reached 70 percent among women with higher education. In Turkey today women with higher education are assuming leading roles in many spheres, primarily in business management, academia, medicine, law and the arts.
One of the main reasons for the increasing number of incidents of reported violence against women surely is the resentment among men who feel male domination being increasingly challenged. Prime Minister Erdoğan recently, and rightly, said violence against women is against humanity; it is simple savagery and is despicable. But one of his party's provincial chiefs declared in a message on the occasion of Women's Day that “it is permissible to lightly beat and threaten women.” This person should be prosecuted for inciting violence against women and immediately expelled from the governing party.
I don't believe Prime Minister Erdoğan's intention is to shut women up in their homes when he has been insistently calling on every woman to get married and bear at least three children. I believe what he is worried about is that if the fertility rate continues to decline, Turkey is likely to suffer by mid-century from the same kind of demographic problems (population decrease, aging and falling rate of economic activity among the population) as in the West.
Research reveals, however, that in all Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, the population growth rate is declining, while women's average marrying age is increasing and the fertility rate is going down. (See David Ignatius, “A demographic shift in the Muslim world,” The New York Times, Feb. 8) It is clear that these trends are the consequences of ongoing modernization processes, which may mean that Prime Minister Erdoğan's calls for at least three children per woman are not likely to be heeded, and that subsidies for families with children may prove more efficient for his purposes.