The Reluctance of Women in Turkey to Take Up STEM Careers Due to Female Unfriendly Practices in Science Education by Elif Sarah Hearn
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, 2008 Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine and Physiology for her identification of HIV was asked in an interview for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings(1) website about the biggest barriers she faced in becoming a leading female scientist. Instead of material obstacles like lack of funding or equipment, Barré-Sinoussi gave a thought-provoking response.
“The biggest obstacle was certain people – men, of course – who discouraged me, saying [science] wasn’t a good career for women. This male-dominated atmosphere pushed me even more to persevere and succeed.” (2)
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IMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN TURKS: THEN AND NOW by Zehra Nur Sarıkaya
The human biology is excellent. Even though we have similarities, each person is different. The two genders, which we call men and women, are full of differences. Men and women are not equal, but any of these different traits in men or women don’t make the other sex superior to the other one. These differences in men and women complement of each other. Unfortunately, because of the physical differences, some people have placed the patriarchal system in our culture by making the man seem superior. The effects of this patriarchal mindset are still visible nowadays. The fact that there are girls who are married at the age of 15 – 16 and who are not sent to school, especially at the east side of the Turkey shows the value given to women very clearly. Of course, not only that, even women living in İstanbul, which we can call the most modern and developed city in Turkey, cannot walk on streets comfortably at night because of the fear of being harassed by men. Also, there are women who are despised in their business environment only because of their gender. Was Turkey which still has problems owing to gender discrimination, always like this? When we go back to the old times, when we look at the ancient Turkish civilizations, did they also have a patriarchal mindset?
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WOMEN IN TURKEY by Leyla Ilıcalı
Turkey is one of the developing economies of the world, where there is still a big social and cultural gap between the people living in the east and the west. There is a certain heritage that is carried from one generation to the other. The group that suffers from this heritage is the Turkish women , who face all sorts of suppression. Among the many challenges that women face in Turkey, child marriages and honor killings are the most common.
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Essay by Selin Şensoy
To be existing as a woman. By all definitions: to be alive, to be recognized as who you are, to be accepted and appreciated, is the biggest challenge for a Turkish woman. Some may say that women have it all in 21. Century, and even may argue that feminism is useless because women gained all their rights on paper. Doubtless, women rights improved at extreme levels in the past century, and discrimination in the constitution reduced significantly. However, changing a way of thinking is much harder than changing a law. Prejudice is not just some legal document you can alter in the written paper. Sexism is so much more than that. It is the brutal consequences of a male-dominated population for centuries, which we encounter daily. It is the fear every woman feels while walking on an empty street at night. It is in every workplace where women are less paid than men. It is in every woman's memories who suffered from their gender.
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Safety Shouldn’t Be A Privilege by Zeynep Öğütçü
For seventeen years, I lived safely. For seventeen years, my family supported me. I wasn’t forced to change my clothing because I got my period at twelve. I wasn’t forced to get married at thirteen. I wasn’t forced to have kids by fourteen. I was never forced to do anything because of my gender. Luckily, I was privileged enough to be safe when safety should never have become a privilege but a right. From the day I was born, I was taught to depend on myself, not on a man where lots of girls were taught to find a rich husband. I never dreamt of becoming a “housewife” or “a servant to my future husband” – the jobs that all women must have in order to be worthy in society. I was able to get a good education in the best schools where many girls were left at home to do housework.
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Let Turkish Women Live by Ceren Şengün
I wish I could say the biggest issue facing women in my country was something small, maybe something related to economic power. However, as I remember how I feel when I turn on the news and see another black and white picture of a woman who has been killed by her husband or ex boyfriend, I’m reminded that there is a danger that women in Turkey are frightened of, an issue that needs immediate attention. The biggest challenge facing some women in Turkey is staying alive. Plain and tragic. There are women terrified of dying in the hands of their loved ones. These murders are so common, there is a specific term dedicated to the widespread occurrences of women being killed by their loved ones: femicide. But why do women die so frequently in a country where we’re supposed to be treated equally on paper?
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Equality Through the Eyes of Society by Kubilay Akkoyun
“The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is the presence of women who are valued.” (Michelle Obama)
In today’s world, unfortunately Women are under-valued for far too long, for a long span of time society expected women to take shape of certain patterns, had to listen and obey others’ opinion and serve men, while men were only responsible for bring home the bread for the family, besides 30 percent of women in the world state that they have been subjected to physical and / or sexual violence by their partners.
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Born Guilty by Ece Karagöz
What was she expecting when going out at night all by herself? Why was she wearing such a skirt anyway? Well, why has she been silent all this time, and now she is talking? These guys are human too; everyone can make mistakes! The men even apologized, what more to do? All these questions, posed by Turkish society after hearing a “gossip” of rape or a “story” of femicide, normalize the inhumane actions towards women and reflect the perception of women’s permanent guilt. While the patriarchal culture favors men in every aspect of social life, the inadequacy of legislation opens the way to staying indifferent to women’s physical and mental suffering in Turkey.
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PLACE OF WOMAN IN TURKEY AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES by Melike Bilgiç
Women all around the world have had their struggle against survival for a very long time. This struggle began in their mothers warn before they were even born. In the early centuries, when a woman gave birth to a child and if the gender was a boy it was a sign of strength and pride for the family. In contrast to giving birth to a girl was a sign of weakness.
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IS VIOLENCE INCLUDED IN LOVE? by Sıla Temiz
Love is a deep connection between living creatures. It is an intense feeling of deep affection. Love is when you can only see through each other’s eyes. Love can occur between two different genders as well as same gender. But “Humans are the only animals that mistreat their female.” as Jack London said. In 2020, more than 300 women were murdered savagely. 97 of them were murdered by their husbands, 54 by their boyfriends, 21 by their ex-husbands and 8 by their ex-boyfriends. Is this your love you talking about in poems? Is this your love which is subject to movies? Is this your love you cannot live without?
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Being a Woman in Turkey by Zeynep Ceren Elçi
In Turkey, the number of women and teenage girls who face different kinds of obstacles continuously increases. Every day we wake up to news about this specific topic. “Husband killed his wife.” “Father raped his 13-year-old daughter.” Despite that these headlines are everywhere, there is no improvement, on the contrary, the number of women who are subjected to violence is increasing even more. However, violence is not the only issue. The inequality between women and men in many areas, such as the workplace and education field, cannot be overlooked either. Although women are indispensible to our society, they are discriminated against due to the bigotry created by cultural and religious dynamics and stereotyping.
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SHADOWS by Büşra Dündar
Humanity has gone through sickening events. Racism, wars, genocide… In the twenty first century, to the outside eye, the world might seem to have gotten better but this one fact destroys all faith left in humanity: women are killed just because they are women. In my country, the biggest challenge women face is being women.
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Boxes by Nisan Başçiftçi
Boxes in different sizes, shapes, and features, in which women try to fit in from the day they were born in Turkey... The only similarity among them is their restrictiveness, molding women’s lives and perceptions. Boxes tell us that you should look perfect, but not too perfect that you wouldn't seduce men, who are not responsible for their actions if you are “asking for it" by showing skin; you shouldn't be skinny, but neither too fat: men would never choose a fat woman as their spouse; you should be powerful, but not too powerful that you would make men feel weak; the guilt is on you if your hijab is not covering every inch of hair because men get seduced as it's their nature. Each corner of our boxes imposes another criterion for women to get to fit in the community.
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There Must Be A Reason for This by Yiğit Bozkurt
Turkish women suffer on a daily basis, much like women from any other country. That much I and anyone not living under a rock knows. We also know how women suffer, right? In a way, yes. Men know from observing said suffering and women know from going through it. But that doesn’t really mean we know how women suffer in a way that can help us end it. See, everyone has an idea of what the biggest challenge women face is but everybody's idea is different from each other. This “realization” hit me during my research prior to me writing this. I started off by asking my friends, teachers and family members what they thought about the subject. I never got the same answer twice. This struck me as odd at first, but I chalked it up to a myriad of reasons, the main one being the casual nature of the conversation we'd just had. Following this I started looking up statistics, research papers, polls and such and to my surprise, I still couldn't find a specific “biggest challenge”. These research papers talked about inequality, abuse of different kinds, unemployment, the lack of education and many more; all incredibly important issues we must address, but none of them was superior to the other. This lack of a consensus coupled with the horrifying nature of the subject of my research made me take a break. But in the back of my mind, I was constantly thinking: There must be a reason for this. Then it hit me: all these people that I talked to, all the research papers that I read, we’re actually talking about the same thing. I just needed to take a step back to see it. See violence, inequality and such are at the surface different but they all branch out from the same underlying cause. The perception of women in our society.
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El âlem: Nameless Gangsters by Dilay Kalınoğlu
El âlem ne der?
It may not make sense to you, but it is a common phrase that Turkish women have to endure every day. For which they even feel obliged to live by it.
As a person who believes that the language we use is a reflection of the society we live in, let me explain the phrase etymologically for you.
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Just Another Hashtag by Mısra Koşarsoy
Tucking my hands in my pockets, I march swiftly towards the subway. It is already catching up on 10 pm and the streets are merely deserted. I feel the minute assuaging knowledge of my mother obtaining my live location; however, the anxiety is not diminishing, rather revolting infinite adversities in my head, urging me to bolt faster. I only realize how much I hold my breath when I see one or two people and walk in a measured pace.
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WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE A COUNTRY’S PRIORITIES by Pervin Janset Cengiz
Most of us can witness the problems that a woman or a girl is facing in our daily lives. The difficulties faced by women are experienced in social life, sometimes in education life and most of them are in business life. On the other hand, the most important thing that shows how developed a country depends on the fact that most of these difficulties are not experienced by women and that these difficulties now seem like primitive and not related problems. If a woman can walk freely on a street in whatever clothes she wants and lives this freedom by dedicating it to the laws then we can infer that the country is a developed democratic free country. In other words, the difficulties that a woman experiences in the country are inversely proportional to the development level of that country.
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Keep Ya Head Up by Sezin Halila
Sexism is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on a person’s sex or gender. It may imply the belief that one sex or gender is intrinsically superior to another. It can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls. Extreme sexism may foster sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual or verbal violence. Unfortunately, in Turkey, sexism against women is a highly effective issue.
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EDUCATE OUR WOMEN by Aslı Turan
An African proverb says: "If you can educate a man, you educate an individual. But if you educate a woman, you educate a nation." According to a TED Talk given by Safeena Husain, an educational activist, women's education is the sixth most important thing to reverse global warming. Even more important than solar panels and electrical cars. An educated woman is most likely to have smaller families, which will affect the world population and carbon emission. Even though educating women can cause massive changes in the world we live in, women are still being disabled from breaking the chain and showing their hidden gem waiting for a break-free.
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Stolen Smiles by Selin Çoklar
It was a beautiful August afternoon when 38 year old woman left her house with her young daughter. The daughter with whom she had peaceful photographs and sweet memories and the daughter for whom she pictured a bright, victorious future.
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