Where Will Educated Covered Women Work?
It now seems possible in practice for women who cover their heads to attend university. Richard Peres, an expert on discrimination law living in Istanbul, writes this essay about the problems Turkish women face AFTER they graduate. Where will they work? What can they do with their degrees? He discusses the discrimination faced by women in general in the labor force and covered women in particular.
He mentions Fatma Benli, a lawyer and head of a women’s NGO whom I also know, who is not allowed to appear in court because she covers her head. She must send in a representative to plead her cases. In 2008, she told me, she was invited to speak at a university about women’s issues, but was turned away at the door when she arrived and they realized she was covered. Her supporters demonstrated and she was allowed to enter and speak, but it was a distasteful example of prejudice against educated women who cover. A couple of years ago, covered women complained that even pious businesses put uncovered women employees in the front office and covered women in the back where no one would see them. And Peres’s story of his highly educated friend who finds that job openings mysteriously disappear when the potential employer learns that she covers is familiar to me. I know a number of women who have had this experience. Once I witnessed a young well-trained accountant looking for an apprenticeship position. She gave her credentials over the phone and the employer seemed very interested. They set up a meeting. At the last moment, the woman told the employer, “I should tell you that I cover.” The response. “Then forget it. Don’t bother to come in.” The young woman was incredibly frustrated. “All I want is some respect,” she lamented. “I tell them that I’m covered on the phone to save me a trip because it’s better than going all the way there and then, when they see me, being told there’s no job.”
Peres writes about the long and violent civil rights struggle in the US and argues that what made it successful was enforcement. When the laws were on the books giving people rights, but there were no statues that made it specifically illegal to discriminate, and when these laws were not enforced, discrimination continued. Only laws that have teeth and are enforced worked, so that now, finally, in the US it is possible for anyone to file a discrimination complaint based on race, religion, gender, national origin, sexual preference and other attributes. Here is an excerpt from Peres’s essay (for the full text, click here):
The goal of anti-discrimination laws in the US was not to change attitudes against African-Americans or prejudices against women. Instead, the objective was to change behaviors in the workplace. In the last 50 years tens of thousands of cases have been filed and litigated. The result today is that employers do all they can to avoid preferential treatment of one group or the other. The laws worked, and they worked because of tough and free enforcement by administrative agencies…
According to an article by Tarhan Erdem from the Radikal daily (Oct. 5, 2010), there are now 17.9 million headscarved women in Turkey, an increase from 16.8 million in 2007 and 14.8 million in 2003. The number of women who choose not to wear headscarves has decreased from 8.1 million in 2003 to 7.4 million in 2007 to 7.6 million in 2010.
Think of it: 18 million women who choose to wear headscarves. That is potentially a very significant political force but one that is not yet fully organized or led. Women who choose to wear a headscarf should consider getting better organized and involved, perhaps even forming their own political party, to influence the passage of anti-discrimination laws. If this force were ever to get organized, on the model of the US civil rights movement, it could bring about the landmark legislation and sweeping changes necessary to enable covered women to work in a non-discriminatory workplace environment. It could bring about behavior change in the workplace, compelled not by changing attitudes only but by the law. That type of change would also bring about more integration of covered women into the mainstream of employment and would support non-covered women as well, providing Turkey with a richer and more productive economy and society as a whole.
However, women who want to wear headscarves must take their struggle into their own hands and get involved in the political process. Waiting for other women, or men, regardless of political affiliation, to bring about real change, to truly reward their attainment of a university education, will unfortunately not be enough.
[...] este sentido, es muy interesante la última entrada del blog de Jenny White y que traduzco a continuación: En la práctica, parece posible que las [...]
I have to wear a tie and shirt to work. I can’t wear jeans and T shirts. Why should these women be able to bypass the dress code just because they believe in fairies?
Jordi, under the proposed scheme, you can show up for your job interview in your jeans and t-shirt and if they don’t hire you then some tough administrative agency will make sure that your prospective employer is punished if you were otherwise qualified. Your clothing preference will be seen just like your sex and race, if what it is is irrelevant to the performance of the actual job, the government will compel the employer to overlook it. This is my understanding of the principle underlying the proposal anyway.
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Not that it would happen, but if something like that did get implemented, in practice it’ll probably work just for covered women and the regulations would include provisions for firing people like you for that fairy analogy. Anyway, people quickly adapt to such things here. Many people observe that mosque attendance for civil servants on Fridays went up after AKP came to power and will likely go down when they lose power. Likewise there are rumours that uncovered female drivers and passengers put on headscarves at roadblocks where they check for drunk driving. You can’t change your sex or race (not easily, anyway) but clothing is easy to change for inspections and to get favoured treatment if you don’t have any hang-ups about it. I myself would put on a headscarf to keep my employer out of trouble or to hold on to my job, for example, if the headscarf gestapo visited my place of work. Covered women, of course, cannot be this flexible as evidenced by the harm done to them by the other kind of headscarf gestapo.
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Since discrimination against covered women by employers who politically and socially support this kind of piety is also mentioned, perhaps our foreign friends ought to start thinking about calling power-hungry hypocrites just that rather than suggesting oppressive schemes empowering yet more civil servants in a country where gov’t employees tend to abuse any latitude given to them.
It just seems such a trivial thing to worry about. I can’t do my job wearing a motorbike helmet (for example) and I am sure if I got a piercing in my face I would be sacked, so why can’t they just conform like everyone else has to? Why do we have to indulge them?
I dug up an article where Nihal Bengisu Karaca (IMHO, rightly) is expressing frustration with parts of the organized/political Islam movement. (I dislike having to say this, but, yes, she wears a headscarf.) I quote from here:
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Kaldı ki bu ülkede inandığı gibi yaşamak, örtünebilmek isteyenlere engel olanlar herhalde “Allah’ın rahmeti” gerekçesiyle yapmadılar bunu. Yüzbinlerce genç kızın hayatı mahvoldu, olmaya da devam ediyor. Bir Nihal Bengisu Karaca’nın şimdilik “yırtmış” gibi görünmesi, birkaç babadan kalma sermayenin, işyerinin başında durup hasbelkader “iş kadını” görüntüsü veren başörtülünün “kaliteli” bir yaşam sürüyor olması, bir miktar başörtülünün “bakan karısı” filan olmuş olması, yüzbinlerce kadının içe dönük, kocaya bağımlı, eğitimsiz ve ekonomik özgürlükten “muaf” bir hayata mahkum kaldığı gerçeğini hükümden düşürecek değil. Haa tabii, sonuçta bu “kadının meselesi”, öyle değil mi?
Herşey bir yana, bu kızlar çıkıp demezler mi, “Madem hiç de şart değildi bu başörtüsü, o zaman bizi niye yediniz, niye kandırdınız? Bıraksaydınız o zaman, hepimiz Nazlı Ilıcak gibi olsaydık, derdiniz neydi?” diye… (emphasis mine)
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I have some verification that Gulen himself (though NBK is mainly reacting to Gulerce from the same movement), used to be strict about headscarves to the point where he told girls to not go to school. Here’s a tape: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xd99r7_fethullah-gulen-in-180-derece-deyiy_lifestyle (I have checked with several people who told me the tape is authentic, but I myself wouldn’t/cannot vouch for it.)
Jordi,
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The facts on the ground are that, for reasons you and I may or may not respect, these women, at least for the time being, regard their headscarves as part of their being/identity. While I wouldn’t like the kind of compulsion advocated and I do think the parallel between race/sex and attire is fundamentally flawed, I can see that the problem does exist. Compelling the employers to, as you say, ‘indulge’ these women may not be solution but that opinion doesn’t make the problem go away. I don’t quite see what the headscarf would hurt in the workplace and I am quite sure if a large portion of the male workforce regarded their earrings as non-negotiable an accomodation would be found. (But economics directly dictate that in case of male labor force. In the female case and given the rate of unemployment here, the supply/demand situation is different.)
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I haven’t seen any numbers about how many educated women with headscarves are unemployed and how it differs from similar female employment in general. I also don’t know how uncovered women with some seniority react to covered ones in the workplace. Jenny has observed that even some women’s rights organizations seem unable to bring covered and uncovered women together for volunteer work. There might be workplace issues there that go beyond simple gender discrimination and involve attitudes of other women. I don’t know. Maybe Jenny would.
If sufficiently many people believe in fairies, then politically speaking, fairies exist.
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In isolation from some objectively problematic artifacts of the phenomenon (e.g., female doctors’ wanting to treat only female patients –in reality or as a thought exercise), this issue has long become a trivial one.
” why can’t they just conform like everyone else has to?”
because in civil society, one aims to empathize with the differences of others, out of a recognition that we are all different in some way, and so we all, in some way, experience the pressure to conform, assimilate, hide something of ourselves- and that none of us likes that pressure; the work of society is to reduce that pressure, especially for those who feel it the most acutely.
I just think that the favorable treatment religion gets is laughable. We need to confront these people and show them that believing in superstitions and fairy tales is backward and unnnecessary, the example of dress codes refers to this. In my office, all the men have to wear ties. If I said my belief in santa claus forbids me to wear a tie, I would be laughed out of the place.
It’s funny then that the world over, everyone has to adjust to Muslim expectations while Muslims see no need to budge.
Emre, for that discriminatory utterance you ought to be punished by a gov’t agency in the future. See my forthcoming piece in Today’s Zaman where I suggest we employ the recently-redundant enforcers of the headscarf ban to impose this new scheme.
I always think the obligatory miniskirt/above-the-knee lady-cut business suit a better analogy for this headscarf-as-sartorial choice issue. Ties may be uncomfortable, but short skirts are uncomfortably objectifying for some/many wearers, much like headscarves MAY be for some women.
emre
exactly, I find it really odd that rational non-religious folk are expected to condone religious bigotry, but religionists are never asked to understand atheism or the absurdity of their superstitous beliefs
I can’t help liken this to a typical Turkish TV program, which is twice (or trice) as long as it should be. Thankfully it ends. Eventually, that is, but I suspect it ends only because it has to. For there are others just like it waiting to take turn.
Nihat,
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Well, the eventual solution found to this problem may cause different problems down the line. So perhaps it isn’t quite that problems are waiting their turn, it is that they are waiting to be created as today’s solutions. Here’s a pleasant analogy: http://www.failgif.com/2010/07/turtle-escape.html
Bulent, turtle escape was delicious. Thanks.
BTW, not that it should matter from a freedoms perspective but I just dug up and oldish (2004) study by Toprak and Kalaycioglu which concluded that headscarves only kept 1% of women out of universitie (as the most importantreason). You might want to check out the first table in the link below for other factors:
http://www.luckynotes.com/2008/02/amac-kizlarin-egitimiyse-turban-sahiden-teferruat-2926.html
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I couldn’t find a newer study.
I am surprised at the comments my article generated. It’s just a simple issue of religious freedom, similar to Jews who work in the US who want to wear a yamulke. It doesn’t affect their job, unless they are modelling hair products. Skeptics may want to read another article of mine in Today’s Zaman, “18 Million Individuals.” Individual rights are for everyone, for minorities, and for majorities (like in Turkey). Richard Peres