Lack of progress on women's rights in Turkey?

Today the Turkish Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women will present its sixth report, which will summarize its progress over the past five years towards achieving, well, their name. The meeting will be at the UN in New York, which makes me suspect they will emphasize the few gains (such as possible increases in girls' school enrollment).

In advance of that meeting, a coalition of 20 women's organizations has released their own report, stating little to no progress has been made in the past 5 years. The main points:

• Conservative gender roles continue, and statements by top officials have only supported them. Prime Minister Erdogan has lately taken to telling every married young woman he meets "have at least three babies!" to prevent the Turkish work force from shrinking. Child rearing is apparently the highest aspiration Turkey's leader has for its young women.
  
  
• Not only is female labor force participation low, but it has been declining since 2005. The report notes that the Turkish employment agency İş-Kur has done nothing to promote female employment despite stated goals of increasing female labor force participation (FLFP) to almost 30% by 2013. This is an issue I have been doing background research on, and hopefully a future priority for TEPAV, which can play a special role thanks to its strong connections with Turkish industry leaders. TEPAV was founded by TOBB, the Turkish chamber of commerce, and is just launching a large, high profile project with İş-Kur to retrain unemployed people in strategic sectors. So to grow more engaged in this, to actually create change, the next step for TEPAV would be to work with the relevant agencies, chambers and NGOs to design, implement, and evaluate programs to increase FLFP.
  
  
• Domestic violence is widespread. A survey from last year shows 39% of women are "affected by domestic violence," which I assume means directly and indirectly, though I can't find the original report. It is clear that the government response has been inadequate; rhetoric and legislation without action. A 2005 law required every municipality with a population of 50,000 (164 by my count) to establish a women's shelter, to date only 52 have. The problem - no funding - this was simply an unfunded mandate, designed to make the government look good while doing nothing. A further consequence is that 42% of women were unaware that the law protected them from domestic violence.
  
  
• Social services - family planning only targets women, women must have consent from their husband to have an abortion, and women are somewhat dependent on husbands or fathers to receive free health care.
  
  
• There are too few women in the media - aside from the attractive women on screen, it's mostly a men's club.

So what can be done? Personally, I'm less interested in advocacy, though of course I see the role for it. The symptoms and perhaps some of the causes are pretty clear, and Turkish society is aware of them. I'm more interested in actively discovering solutions to some of these problems, especially female employment, with the perhaps naive view that this has the potential to empower and combat traditional discriminatory gender roles. So the next step for TEPAV will be, as I mentioned above, to work with the right partners to begin the learning cycle of design, implement, evaluate...

A final point - it seems mainly "women's organizations" are working on women's rights issues in Turkey, which I would guess is the norm around the world. The problem in Turkey is that it is too easy for men to dismiss these organizations as pastimes for the wives of rich men or outlets for angry feminists, even when they are doing good research, advocacy or service provision. In a policy environment where men hold most of the power, what can be the catalyst for change? I argue that on issues such as female employment, it will take an organization such as TEPAV, which powerful men cannot dismiss so easily.

Can't argue with his logic

"Where does alcohol come from? Don't they produce these drinks from fruits? Eat fruits instead of drinking then!"

-Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, accepting an award from the WHO on a remarkably successful indoor smoking ban (which has had the wonderful consequence of even more outdoor seating at restaurants). I suspect his campaign to reduce alcohol consumption will not succeed through rational persuasion alone, but the extremely high taxes his party have imposed, along with reduction in liquor and bar licenses perhaps will: a bottle of raki that cost 9 lira 8 years ago now costs 35 lira!

Erdogan chose the WHO platform to make these remarks, but is this a health issue? Perhaps, but there are certainly larger health concerns in Turkey: Turks consume 1.4 liters of alcohol per year, compared to 9.o in neighboring Greece, and 4.4 in indulging Qatar. Car accidents are a larger problem: almost 500,000 per year, with 4,500 fatalities, but it is not clear how many were due to drunk driving, versus everyday erratic driving.

What am I actually doing?

So far TEPAV has been an exciting place to work, and I've met dozens of bright, enthusiastic people working on interesting projects, who are always looking for new chances to inform policy through research or direct consultation. I've been involving myself in their efforts to expand their influence in social policy, especially in health, education, and women's policy. So far I've been collaborating with Esen, Asli, Sarp, Emin, Sibel and Selin.

Health

TEPAV had never done any work in the health sector before, so we started with a background note describing Turkey's health system, recent reform efforts, and their impact. Turkey has been succesful in expanding health insurance coverage, to 95% of it's population according to some sources, which inspired the headline "Obama imitated Turkey in health reform." It seems that while Turkey has been increasing financial risk protection simply by spending more money (including tripling the salaries of health workers) - they neglected the politically difficult step of establishing cost-control mechanisms, so maybe Obama copied Turkey more than the journalist realized.

But Turkey's challenges are perhaps greater than in the US, as Turkey suffers from a double disease burden - infectious diseases faced by many poorer countries, and rising rates of obesity and diabetes as in richer countries. As one colleague bluntly put it - "Turkey is part Europe, part Africa." This is not entirely an exaggeration - under-five-mortality among the children least educated mothers in Turkey is comparable to that of Algeria, Namibia and South Africa (World Health Organization).

Education

TEPAV has somewhat more experience in education, because of education's role in developing workers for the economy, which is closer to TEPAV's founding interests. Similar to the health sector, we are starting with a background on Turkey's complex education system, the subject of constant tinkering without any deep reform. One encouraging sign here is that female enrollment in primary, secondary, and tertiary education has been increasing in the past decade, though we're still learning how trustworthy the data is. The education ministry brags about increases in female enrollment, but it seems much of the increase has been due to revisions in the census methodology. More on that later.

Within both health and education, I am helping TEPAV grow by planning impact evaluations of specific policies and pilot programs. Specifically, I am interested in using randomized evaluations, which I have several years experience in while working with my previous employer, the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, but integrating this methodology in an approach that HKS professor Lant Pritchett calls evaluation with a "little e". Essentially, policy-makers must admit relative ignorance in what policy will work, design several variants of a program, and using monitoring data, see which seem to be the most cost effective. The most effective program could be a candidate for scaling up, but the learning does not stop there. The goal is not to identify a permanent solution to increasing girls enrollment, but to use "little e" as a good problem solving system, as Bill Easterly recently wrote about.

Women's (labor force) policy

While we're not ignoring how education and health policies affect women and girls, I've been working on another topic with a pure focus on women's policy - female labor - the subject of an earlier blog post. This research has shown that while female labor force participation is very low in Turkey, it is significantly higher than what would be expected given Turkey's level of economic development, the percentage of Muslims in Turkey (and a few other controls). Now I am reviewing the policy options available to Turkey to increase opportunities for women who want to work, for example: removing the headscarf ban in public buildings (including universities and civil service), increasing preschool subsidization and provision (so mothers who want to work can), subsidizing child care, and policies such as conditional cash transfers to increase girls' school enrollment.

The headscarf ban is of course a very complex, politically charged issue, which I'm still learning about after more than 10 years of visiting Turkey. At first I thought it was merely an Orientalist obsession, just a symbol of what separates West and East. While the symbolic value is there, it is a hotly debated issue internally in Turkey, which I'll write more about later. However, TEPAV does not want to inject itself into the complex political and cultural aspects of the debate. If possible, TEPAV wants to conduct neutral research to inform the arguments, especially relating to the effect on the economy, and female education, labor, and general participation in society.

But is there any neutral territory? Will those who dislike our research findings label us disingenuous, concealing ulterior motives? We'll see!

"The Kurdish problem"

Some argue the Kurdish problem is really a regional problem - many Kurds are fully integrated into Turkish society, with possibly a million Turkish-Kurdish weddings, Kurdish TV stations, and now a Kurdish head of the CHP. With Kurds increasingly participating in broader Turkish society, why does the PKK continue to grow? This is an interesting angle I have not heard before::

Another important finding of the report was the higher number of women who are recruited by the PKK. The major reason behind this was the overall negative attitude dominant in the region towards girls and women. The PKK, which claims that it values women and sees them as equals, can readily attract female participants.

An unnamed expert from the region is quoted in the report as saying: “It is very difficult to be a female child in this area. The society’s view of girls is very clear. Only boys are counted; to them, the girls aren’t there. They send them to school because they have to. They are never happy when they have a baby girl. They don’t have any place in the family; they are forced into marriage. They have to live in poverty because of the dowry paid by the groom. The groom spends all his money on the dowry. They are denied their right to inheritance. What can a girl do in this desperation?” The study found that girls join the organization [PKK] to escape these problems.

While I should be wary of "unnamed experts," it is an interesting theory about the regional strength of the movement. Full article here.

"Being a woman in Şırnak"

“In this region, if one has 250 Liras or a color television to sell to the old men, it is difficult to be not only a woman but a human being in general.”

From a letter sent to the Turkish Federation of Women’s Associations, referring to the practice of selling women. There are shocking reminders like this in the Turkish press several times a week that Atatürk's vision of equality for women is far from realized.

Avrupalılaştıramadıklarımızdan mısınız?

The title is one of the longest words in Turkish, meaning: Are you one of those whom we could not Europeanize? [Insert joke about never-ending EU ascension process here].

Amid widespread claims that the West has "lost Turkey" (who knew we owned it?), a report published this morning made we wonder - are Turkish attitudes towards gender equality more European, or more similar to Turkey's Muslim neighbors to the east? The Pew Global Attitudes Project released a report on a survey of gender equality attitudes in 22 countries, with some surprising results, some less so.

In Turkey, 95% of respondents said women should be able to work outside the house (while only one-quarter of Turkish women actually do), but 67% said when jobs are scarce, men should have more of a right to jobs. So in the first question Turkey is on pace with its EU neighbors, but in the second question closer to the six other predominantly Muslim countries.

When asked if "women should have the right to decide if they wear a veil," 96% of Turks said yes! (see graph). What the survey does not get into is why people say yes. For a lot of Turks, perhaps this is a strong statement against the ban on headscarves in public spaces (including public and private universities, courts, and government buildings), which has been imposed on the public since Atatürk, and recently maintained by the secular constitutional court.

But the way the question is phrased, staunch secularists might agree as well. For them, perhaps they are imagining a protective father or husband forcing a woman to wear a headscarf. For these people, it is also, at least partially, an issue of women's freedom, but freedom from a woman's oppressive father or husband, not from the oppressive state.

Regardless, there is a large divide between Muslims in countries like Turkey, Indonesia, Lebanon (Muslim population is about 60%), and Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria. Interestingly, Pakistan is between the two extremes because 83% of women think it is their right, while only 47% of men do, the largest gender gap.

Another question in which Turkey stood out - do men have a better life than women? Without dividing the results between genders, Turkey was middle of the road. But Turkey had the biggest gender gap - only 19% of men said men have a better life (most men said both do), but 46% of women said men do (with most of the rest saying both, few saying women do).

So why does Turkey have the largest difference in perceptions between men and women?