Say Yes, Summer 2003: A Gender Review in Education (2)
Families
In 2002, 310,806 people took part in parents’ training as part of the Ministry of Education Girls’ Vocational Education programme. While fathers are invited, they constituted just over a quarter (27.4%) of the participants.
Source: MONE 2003.
Home and family should be the least stressful place for a child to learn, yet it is also where the conditioning of girl children as second class citizens begins. This is not peculiar to Turkey -- it is familiar to advocates of women’s and children’s rights the world over -- but that is not to excuse the prevalence of gender discrimination especially in rural areas. High rates of illiteracy and a value system focused on the needs of men and boys tends to place those of girls and women second.
All too frequently, a girl is considered to be more valuable to the family doing housework rather than homework, looking after younger brothers and sisters and carrying out chores from early on. Care of the household is viewed as the girl’s natural responsibility and if she fulfils her duties in this respect, she is deemed to have learned all she needs to know.
It is common for the girl to be seen as the property of her family and the family she subsequently marries into rather than as an individual in her own right. Her value is based on what she can do for the family in the present rather than how she will develop in the future. The question of her education is easily ignored in this context.
Economic barriers further complicate the question of educating girl children. For poorer families, the cost of books, transport, food and clothing for girls are easily viewed as frivolous expenses. Such attitudes exist even though:
Although net enrolment rates in primary education had improved at the close of the millennium, enrolment rates for girls were still lower than enrolment rates for boys.
Source: State Institute of Statistics (SIS).
- child labour is forbidden in Turkey;
- the Constitution says that discrimination is to be avoided;
- a primary education of at least eight years is compulsory for every child in Turkey.
In reality many poor families require their children, especially the girls, to work instead of sending them to school: they are unaware of the advantages to be gained by sacrificing her income from work or the hidden value of her labour at home in favour of her education.
Families need to understand the relevance of education to their girls’ lives both as primary care-givers of the future and as individuals in their own right. There is an argument that girls have few opportunities to make use of an education outside of the home which is spuriously borne out by figures on gender in the professions but it is little more than a self-fulfiling prophesy exploiting discrimination against women today only to perpetuate discrimination against women of the future.
| Profession | Percentage of Women |
|---|---|
| Members of Parliament | 4% |
| Civil Service | 33% |
| Academics | 36% |
| Lawyers | 19.7% |
| Medicine | 33.8% |
| School Principals | 4% |
Source: Directorate General of Status and Problems of Women, 2002.
In cases where girls attend school, there is a pattern of late enrolment and early withdrawal from the system, often to make an early marriage, which needs to be changed. Many families remove their girls from school because they have reached puberty: one girl interviewed in Kars, implied that having reached adolescence, school was no longer relevant to her future.
The children themselves, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, view paid employment as a more attractive option than schooling since it increases their standing within the family. So they innocently collude in the subversion of their education.
Continue to part 3, Schools.
Read the full version of A Gender Review in Education, Turkey 2003 online or download the document in pdf format [PDF 632KB].
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SAY YES, SUMMER 2003
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