Heads or Tails
Women and men are two sides of the same coin, they are different but also united. In Turkey, they get the idea of being different, but not united especially in the workplace. This is the toughest challenge on women about developing their own careers. To be more specific there is six important issues. The most concerned problem in Turkey is power play making by men. They don’t let their wives to work because they think they are earning enough money for their family. Indeed most of the women want to work because of the future plans and to be stand on their own legs. Doing a power play only makes everything worse because only one of three women can work in Turkey. That’s a terrible percentage, also this causes illiteracy even in the modern world.
Let’s say they take “permission” from their husbands to work, but is it enough? Are they feeling comfortable in the office circumstances? Unfortunately not, because there are lots of other problems they’re facing with. It starts with the wage gap, most of the women work for a pittance because they are not working in the good positions as men do. we all know that it will be long and hard journey to create gender parity but continuing these situation make women only to feel like they are worthless, they haven’t got many options to be a vice president, for example and this brings us into the challenges about the career opportunities. Most of the women believe that men have better chance to approach to the professional developing future then women do, because the employers think that women employees cannot afford these tiring situation. Also another thing is only ten percent of women in Turkey occupied the c-suite which means it’s even harder to create a new business world by them as well so what they should do? Giving up from all these things with sitting at home and be controlled by their husbands. Absolutely not, they have a right to work in good conditions. Why should they ignore this reality? However, the problems are not finishing. If they figured out how to achieve their goals about their dream careers now they should make a balance between their life and work. Because if they start only to concentrate for their job, that will probably affect to their personal life. Meeting with friends will decrease and coming late to home will increase. Maybe this situation cause them to get divorced with their husbands. That means there isn’t any average working hours and types, either very few or too much. Furthermore, if they will have a new member of their families everything will be ruined about their future plans. Half of the working women in Turkey think that having a child cannot be in the way of building a career because their husbands are not so helpful about this issue and also the length of maternity leave is not enough to raise up children. Only 8 weeks before and 8 weeks after having a birth. Some of the companies are asking to the women before they get the job that if they will have children because they won’t let them to leave for maternity. Again this made women to move away from the plan to have a career. Maybe the maternity leaves can be longer as a 4 months and you could work in flexible hours until your baby become a year old to encourage women into work conveniently. Don’t think it’s over by all of these stuff, there is one more, the most shaming one. “Harassment” Lots of developing countries especially like Turkey and India are suffering from this terrible situation, even worse the women cannot admit this. That makes me, as a Turkish citizen, feel embarrassed. It can be any other reasons which I wrote above to not prefer working but this cannot be count as a reason. Women cannot be the victim of ignorant minds.
The all challenges which women are facing with, is all above. These are the realities even you want to hide them. Sometimes when you ask that why we cannot be developed country as Britain or United States, I think the answer is here. If there won’t any challenges for your women in your country then you would be a developed country, it goes on that way. However, women are the sufferers. The vigour of their youth ends without caring about their tears.
Sezin Erkalp