Yüksel Sezgin writes: On Nov. 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced at a women’s rights conference that he did not believe in gender equality because it contradicted the laws of nature.
Turkey before the 2002 election of the AKP was no feminist utopia. In 2001, under the rule of a secular coalition government led by the social democrat Bulent Ecevit, Turkey ranked only 81 out of 175 countries in the United Nations Development Program’s Gender-related Development Index, which measures the gender gap in human development in terms of health, education and income. Turkey lagged behind not only the Western European democracies but also such Muslim-majority states as Saudi Arabia (68), Lebanon (70), Jordan (75) and Tunisia (76). Similarly, according to the UNDP’s 2001 Gender Empowerment Measure.
In pre-AKP Turkey, about one in 10 women in the east lived in polygamous marriages (despite the prohibition of polygamy since 1926), and about 200 girls and women every year were killed by close relatives in the name of protecting “family honor.” In July 2001, the social democratic-led coalition government passed a regulation requiring female nursing students to undergo virginity tests before being admitted into their studies.
The first AKP government under Erdogan’s premiership was actually cause for some hope among many Turkish women. In 2004, Erdogan’s government passed a new penal code. It criminalized marital rape, eliminated the old penal code’s patriarchal and gender-biased language and imposed a number of measures to prevent sentence reductions traditionally granted by Turkish courts to perpetrators of honor crimes.
Despite these positive legislative initiatives, things have not improved on the ground. Indeed, Turkey has become one of the worst countries in terms of violence against women.
Nor has economic growth offered significant improvements. According to the UNDP, Turkey’s GDP per capita income (in 2011 purchasing power parity terms) rose from $13,090 in 2000 to $18,167 in 2012. In other words, there was about a 39 percent increase in per capita income over a period of 12 years – the last 10 years of which were under AKP rule. According to the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, in 2013 Turkey ranked 123 out of 136 countries in terms of women’s participation in the labor force.
On the same index, Turkey ranked 103 in terms of women’s political empowerment.
According to the UNDP, economic expansion did not translate into better health and education opportunities for Turkish women. In 2002, Turkey ranked 70 out of 169 countries on UNDP’s GDI. In 2007, about five years after AKP came to power, Turkey was still 70 on the GDI index, even though its rank on the Human Development Index improved from 88 to 79 over the same period. In 2008 on UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index (GII, a composite index that replaced the earlier GDI and GEM) Turkey ranked 77, while in 2013 it ranked 69 out of 187 countries. Over the same period, Turkey’s HDI rank also improved from 83 to 69. Despite an overall increase in income and access to education and health care, the Turkish government has largely failed to improve the status of women and reduce persisting gender inequalities, especially with respect to women’s participation in the labor force and political empowerment.
While this sorry record reflects poorly on the AKP governments, it should not be used to forget the long history of struggles for Turkish women. Turkey was one of the worse places in the world to be a woman before the AKP, and it still is today.
