What the City Has to Offer: Urbanization and Women's Empowerment in Turkey

Download

index.pdf

Date

2018-06-01

Author

Çınar, Süleyman Kürşat

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

245
views

0
downloads

This article examines the relationship between urbanization and women's empowerment through the Turkish case. The article first tests statistically the overall impact of urbanization on women's empowerment by tapping into educational, economic, and political indicators at the province level. The results yield a positive relationship between urbanization and women's empowerment. We argue that these empowerment indicators demonstrate the necessary conditions of women's empowerment, yet whether these are sufficient for women to feel empowered needs to be further tested. To do so, the article utilizes an extensive original survey of 334 well-educated urban women in 43 out of 81 provinces of Turkey to examine the extent to which the results found in the quantitative section are paralleled by the actual experiences of women. The survey analysis reveals prospects and obstacles that well-educated women face in old and new urban centers. This nonrandom, purposive sample of seemingly empowered urban women shows that the barriers faced by these women would easily multiply when lower strata of society are reached. The Turkish case demonstrates that societal transformations such as urbanization have an imprint on the fates of women, yet further women's empowerment needs collective action at the political, legal, and societal levels.

Subject Keywords

Female empowerment, Eeconomic-development, Working women, Migrant women, Gender, Reflections, Democracy, Intersectionality, Representation, Participation

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/46106

Journal

POLITICS & GENDER

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/s1743923x18000028

Collections

Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Changing discourse on women and islam in Turkey in ethnographic studies Onur, Petek; Saktanber, Ayşe Nur; Department of Sociology (2016) This thesis provides an analysis of the change of ethnographic discourse on women and Islam in Turkey. Based on the theoretical framework of feminist postcolonial theory it analyses the ethnographic studies as texts and focuses on the concepts of subjectivity, subalternnes, otherness, and agency in Muslim women's discursive representations and binarism, Eurocentricism, essentialism in the way discourse is produced. It adopts Michel Foucault’s theorization of discourse, knowledge and power as a methodology t...
UNDP's approach to women's rights: dthe case of Turkey Devlet, Yelda; Ertürk, Yakın; Department of Gender and Women's Studies (2006) This study has focused on UNDP’s approach to women’s rights particularly in Turkey. In order to provide a context for the discussion of the role of the UNDP in Turkey on the realization of women’s rights, the thesis examines the emergence of women’s rights discourse within the international arena and its repercussions in Turkey. This has facilitated the understanding of (1) the emergence of a women’s rights movement at the global level, (2) the spread of the idea and perception of ‘women’s rights’ movement ...
Money-earning activities and empowerment experiences of rural migrant women in the city Erman, Tahire; Kalaycıoğlu, Sibel; Rittersberger, Helga İda (Elsevier BV, 2002-7) This article investigates empowerment in relation to money-earning activities in the context of rural-to-urban migrant women in poor families in Turkey. Acknowledging the exploitative character of employment accessible to migrant women, it asks whether working migrant women gain something in their families in return for their economic contributions. The article points to the traditional role of men as the heads of the family and family honor (namus) as the cultural basis which acts against the empowerment o...
The critical overview of the European Union gender equality policies and their implications for Turkey Gökalp, N. Ela; Ertürk, Yakın; Department of Sociology (2005) Since the 1990̕s, interest in the European Union (EU) gender equality policies has increased among feminist scholars and activists. In this context, studies focusing on equal pay for work of equal value, equal treatment in education, and access to employment, among others have been undertaken and different dimensions of the EU gender equality policies have been a subject of much debate. This thesis is an effort to critically review the potential of these policies vis-à-vis their capacity to bring about gend...
The Determinants of Women's Empowerment in Turkey: A Multilevel Analysis Çınar, Süleyman Kürşat (2018-01-01) This article analyses the state and determinants of women's empowerment in Turkey, based on an extensive and representative survey with more than 100,000 participants. It creates an original index of women's self-perceived empowerment, which incorporates empowerment measures on health, education, income, social life, and personal care and conducts multilevel analysis that integrates effects of individual-level factors with contextual, locality-specific forces. Multilevel analysis confirms the nested nature ...

Citation Formats

S. K. Çınar, “What the City Has to Offer: Urbanization and Women’s Empowerment in Turkey,” POLITICS & GENDER, pp. 235–263, 2018, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/46106.