Many women excluded from work life due to scarf ban

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This is in violation of the Constitution, human rights and democratic principles, Can Paker, head of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), said while introducing a new report on covered women and professional life in Turkey. Titled the “Headscarf Ban and Discrimination: Headscarved Women in Professional Life,” the report was prepared by Dilek Cindoğlu, an associate professor of political science and public administration at Bilkent University. The report was introduced to the press by TESEV on Tuesday at a press conference in İstanbul.

“The report seeks to open the headscarf ban, which has remained under the siege of politics, to debate. The matter of discussion is the ban itself but not the headscarf. Thousands of women who were trained in popular universities are excluded from business life because of the headscarf they are wearing. They are not employed in state institutions, which largely exist thanks to the taxes of the headscarved women and their families. Furthermore, they cannot find ‘proper positions’ at private companies. We believe that the headscarf ban goes against democracy, human rights and social peace. We hope the findings of the report will contribute to the lifting of the ban,” Paker noted.

The report will be followed by a new one, slated for April 2011. The report includes a survey among 79 women and 25 men on the headscarf ban.

The notorious ban on the use of the Muslim headscarf has been a matter of contention in Turkey. A headscarf ban applies to certain public and government offices and locations in Turkey. The ban affects university students as well as those working in the public sector. Women with headscarves are not allowed to enter military facilities, including hospitals and recreational areas belonging to the Turkish military.

Cindoğlu said the report mainly seeks to shed light on the problems faced by headscarved women who received higher education when being employed and during their professional lives. For her, Turkey wasted much time discussing the ban on the use of the headscarf at universities and it had better start discussing how and why covered women are discriminated against in professional life.

“Headscarved women we talked to during the preparation of the report told us that they are asked to be ‘invisible’ in offices. What does being ‘invisible’ mean? To work in the back rooms of a company, for example, or to work at a lower position for a lower salary. Or not to be allowed to attend business meetings. However, earlier research showed that up to 70 percent of Turkey’s women wear the Muslim headscarf and around 40 percent of women in business life are headscarved, Cindoğlu stated, and added that headscarved women are expected to “make concessions” if they are to be employed by companies, which is sometimes to agree to work for a low salary or at a lower position without the chance of promotion some day or to agree to take off the headscarf if necessary.

Cindoğlu also said women wearing the headscarf also face discrimination when being fired. “For example, if a company has to fire an employee, it’s usually a covered women who gets sacked even if she has better qualifications or is more hardworking than a non-covered woman because businessmen usually believe it is a ‘disadvantage’ to work with headscarved employees,” she said.

‘Bitter expectation’ of a mother

Yıldız Ramazanoğlu, a novelist, also delivered a speech during the TESEV conference. She said she expressed her wish for the lifting of the headscarf ban when she first hugged her daughter in 1987, but the ban has still yet to be abolished.

“I was about to cry when I heard the same expectation from a mother in 2010. We see that years pass by but expectations remain the same,” she noted. According to Ramazanoğlu, there is still a social gap between conservatives and secularists and that some secularists do not even leave their homes for several days at a time in order to not see a covered woman on the street.

“Children of headscarved women hope their fathers attend parent-teacher meetings rather than their mothers because they are fully aware that their mothers will not be ‘accepted’ or ‘respected.’ They believe their father will be a source of less problems for them,” she added.

Ramazanoğlu also stated that covered women face discrimination at the hands of conservative men, who believe a non-covered woman is more intellectual than her covered peer, for example. “This is why it makes men happy to see that covered women do not have the right to get elected in national elections. In this way, fewer women are elected to Parliament, for instance. And a majority of parliamentary seats are occupied by men,” she said. Women wearing the headscarf are neither elected to Parliament nor allowed to participate in any voting other than casting a vote at the ballot box.

BETÜL AKKAYA DEMIRBAŞ İSTANBUL