Tag: Women Issues

Daily chart: Sex and equality

Cinsiyet eşitsizliğinde 136 ülke arasında 120. sırada yer alan Türkiye ve Güney Kore en aykırı ülkeler olarak gözüktüler.

Sex and equality

Oct 25th 2013, 16:32 by K.N.C., P.K. and G.S.

How women fare around the world

FOR eight years the World Economic Forum has released a ranking of how women are narrowing the gap compared to men in the terms of political participation, economic opportunity, health and education. The highest ranked countries are Scandinavian; almost two-thirds of 136 countries examined narrowed their gaps. (Intriguingly, the Philippines ranked 5th and Cuba 15th, far ahead of Britain and America.) Yet the overall scores mask interesting differences. Looking at the G20—a smattering of countries from all regions that play a role in international policymaking—the degree to which equality in health and education has largely been achieved is striking. The most notable outliers are Turkey and South Korea, who both seem ready to graduate from emerging market status—but in terms of gender equality, look to have more work to do. And Japan is especially depressing: the third largest economy ranks 105th in the Forum’s report.

via Daily chart: Sex and equality | The Economist.

October 25, 2013
Turkey: Country’s Thick Glass Ceiling Slowly Cracking?

Seeing as its International Women’s Day today, Hurriyet Daily News economics columnist Emre Deliveli uses the occasion to remind readers that the labor force participation (LFP) rate for women in Turkey is a woeful 29.5 percent (the average among countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which Turkey is a member of, is 61 percent).

Improving the visibility and participation of women in the workplace has certainly been one of the areas where the current Turkish government has failed to take any strong action. The most recent World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, for example, finds Turkey ranked 124 out of 135 countries. Beyond the low LFP rate for women, Turkey also has extremely low numbers of women in senior and managerial positions in government and academia.

Still, despite the discouraging numbers, things may be changing. From a recent article by Guven Sak, executive director of the Ankara-based Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey:

Recently, I chatted with a friend who is an industrialist from Konya province. He said, “Until recently, we preferred male employees. But the pool of male applicants has shrunk at the city center. So we started to run shuttles to attract employees from the other districts of Konya. The number of female employees has been increasing now.” Konya is among the ten provinces that recorded the highest growth in women’s employment from 2004 to 2011, with a figure above 100 percent. TEPAV’s calculations suggest that non-agricultural the FLFP rate is 20 percent in Turkey and 15 percent in Konya. But the city improved the rate from 7 percent in 2004. We have to note this remarkable improvement over the last seven years. Turkey has been changing with respect to women’s employment dynamics.

Let me draw some conclusions. First, with industry spreading towards it, Anatolia has been changing. In the 1980s, everyone was sure that opening up to the world would bring affluence. Today they are about to learn that if half of the population is confined to their homes, Turkey will not become affluent. Industry teaches this lesson: factories that were opened in Anatolia thanks to Özal’s reforms started to employ women only recently and out of necessity. Increases in women’s employment at the provincial level from 2004 to 2011 validate this. After three decades, market reforms continue to transform Anatolia. This is worth emphasizing.

Second, there is a strong positive relationship between provincial growth and women’s employment. We don’t have province-level growth series, but TURKSTAT releases the statistics on the size of completed or partially completed new buildings to be used as workplaces. The floor area of a new office, wholesale and retail trade, and industrial buildings grow as economic activity in the city becomes more vibrant. According to a study by TEPAV economist Güneş Aşık, women’s employment grows along with the area of new office buildings, and that of new buildings for retail trade in particular. First, let me stress that economic growth enhances women’s participation in the labor force. When it comes to skilled labor, employers open up to employing women, too. With growth and structural transformation, the services sector, where women’s employment is easier and more prevalent, also grows. As needs grow, wages increase.

As Deliveli points out, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has set a goal of raising the women’s LFP to 38 percent by 2023. It’s an admirable goal, but one that would still leave Turkey far behind where it should be.

via Turkey: Country’s Thick Glass Ceiling Slowly Cracking? | EurasiaNet.org.

March 9, 2013
İstanbul Kadın Müzesi – Women´s Museum

The Women´s Culture Foundation Istanbul was founded on 8 March 2011 in order to create the Women´s Museum Istanbul, as it was felt that there was a need for one given the importance of the issue. it is regarded as a gift for future generations.

By initiating the project of the Women´s Museum Istanbul, the Foundation has creates a space to inform about and honor women´s contribution in the city’s almost 2700 years’ history. The Women’s Museum Istanbul to function as a professional institution based on world-standard understanding and the criteria of contemporary museology.

The Foundation also promotes partnerships of the local and foreign scientific and cultural institutions engaging in similar work and helps to initiate social responsiblity projects in women´s history as well as to advise other cities on establishing musems of women.

Gülümser Yıldırım

Board Chair

Women´s Culture Foundation Istanbul

via İstanbul Kadın Müzesi – Mission.

February 19, 2013
Elif Batuman: A Women’s Theatre in Rural Turkey : The New Yorker

ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM ARSLANKÖY about the Arslanköy Women’s Theatre Group, an all-female theatre group, based in rural Turkey, which is writing and performing plays. Ümmiye Koçak, who is now in her mid-fifties, was a forty-four-year-old farmworker with a primary-school education when she caught the theatre bug from a school play that a local school principal, Hüseyin Arslanköylü, had staged the previous year. Ümmiye had never seen a play before, and it seeped into her thoughts. For a long time, she had been puzzling over the situation of village women and the many roles they had to play. In the fields, they worked like men; in villas, they became housekeepers; at home, they were wives and mothers. In 2000, with other women from her village, Arslanköy, she formed the Arslanköy Women’s Theatre Group. The group met every night at the school, after the women had worked ten- or twelve-hour days on farms. Their first production, a contemporary Turkish play called “Stone Almonds,” sold out a theatre in the provincial capital of Mersin, and was written up in the national press. They were invited to Istanbul, to be on TV; none of the women had ever been on an intercity bus before. In 2003, the women collaborated on a play called “Woman’s Outcry,” based on their own difficult life experiences, which included kidnapping, forced marriage, and domestic abuse. They performed the play in Arslanköy, in front of their husbands and village officials. A documentary about “Woman’s Outcry” became an international success, winning prizes at the Trieste and Tribeca festivals; Ümmiye travelled abroad for the first time, attending galas in Spain. In 2009, she played the title role in her own adaptation of “Hamlet.” This spring, she finished shooting her first screenplay, about a downtrodden mother and daughter who herd goats in the Taurus Mountains. It can be difficult to grasp just how remarkable these achievements are. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Atatürk’s secularizing reforms put Turkey at the vanguard of feminism. Turkish women got the vote in 1934, before women in Italy and France. Atatürk’s daughter was a combat pilot. But in rural Turkey the new secular constitution had little effect on the old patriarchal culture, and women’s lives continued much as they always had. Today, some Turkish women are C.E.O.s, best-selling novelists, Olympic gold medalists, and Constitutional Court judges. Other Turkish women—hundreds of thousands of them—are rape victims or child brides. An estimated thirty per cent of rural Turkish women haven’t completed elementary school, and forty-seven per cent have been beaten or raped by their husbands. Writer meets with Ümmiye Koçak and women who act in her new theatre group, and travels with them while they stage productions in rural Turkey. Describes Koçak’s life, and her development as a writer; recounts the history of the theatre group, describing many of the plays they have staged. Describes a women’s outreach program in a remote village, at which Koçak’s group stages a play, and the backstage atmosphere at one of their performances. Describes in detail the arduous process of filming “Wool Doll,” Koçak’s first film, which began in the winter, when Arslanköy is buried under ten feet of snow. Mentions the various positions which Turkey’s conservative Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has taken against abortion rights.

via Elif Batuman: A Women’s Theatre in Rural Turkey : The New Yorker.

December 17, 2012
Young Women’s Chaos in Istanbul

I and my colleague Katarina Härröd have had the opportunity to take part in the meeting of Young Women’s Network of South Caucasus in Istanbul the last three days. From time to time it has been chaotic; strong feelings, problems, “aha” points in discovering similarities and differences, a mixture of languages and new friendships all mixed with a spirit of young activism and a sense that everything is possible.

Tomorrow we leave Istanbul to continue with a smaller group of young people to take part in an Integrated Security Workshop; the weather forecast says it will be cloudy, rainy and cold but we hope for a warm and cosy atmosphere within the group which will keep us warm and motivated for the rest of the week.

via Young Women’s Chaos in Istanbul | Vi på Kvinna till Kvinna.

November 8, 2012
UN Women to open regional office in Turkey

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women– will open a regional office in Turkey.

Thanks to efforts by Turkish Foreign Ministry and Family & Social Policies Ministry, the office, which will be responsible from Europe and Central Asia, will be opened in Istanbul.

UN Women will support intergovernmental organs while they are shaping up policies, and setting the norms and standards.

It will also provide financial and technical support, encourage effective cooperation with civil society, and help members states to apply the standards.

via UN Women to open regional office in Turkey – Trend.Az.

September 24, 2012