Caught in the prime minister’s riptide

I’m still having trouble grasping what Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said next: "One cannot learn swimming on land. One reason that women’s employment seems low is the unregistered work."

Perhaps this was a coded message to millions of women in low-paying jobs with no contracts, benefits or rights to march seaward in rebellion behind textile worker Emine Arslan. Arslan is entering her sixth month of a solitary sit-in protest in Istanbul against her employer, leather goods supplier Desa, which fired her days after she joined a union. A Sink or Swim Revolution.

When world leaders in gender equality came to the Bosphorus this week for the International Conference on Women in Governance, featured on this page, the Balkans and Spain presented Turkey with a lesson on moving from total rejection to implementation of gender quotas.

Women represent 9.1 percent of the Turkish Parliament and 0.56 percent of local administrations, while the European Parliament is 30 percent female. With ongoing campaigns from groups such as the Association to Support and Educate Women Candidates (KA-DER) and The Turkish Coordination of the European Women's Lobby, or EWL, the demand for representation has largely fallen on deaf ears at the prime ministry level Ğ which ensured that the matter stay out of the state’s next five-year plan.

Turkey’s top business group TÜSİAD, employers’ organizations and unions have embraced using a quota system in Turkey’s governance. The leading opposition People’s Republican Party, or CHP, backs it as well, though their record of including women hardly reflects such a view.

Women’s political worth
Some analysts say that without women's door-to-door campaigning, the AKP couldn’t have pulled off its 2002 victory. Grassroots success aside, women's AK Party branches have no official power or budget.

With local elections approaching in March, Erdoğan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) will soon reveal how many women they place high enough up on the candidate lists to be considered electable endorsements. Only 25 out of the AKP's 340 deputies are women, and there is only one female minister in Erdoğan's cabinet. Activists want to change this dynamic by reforming election rules to allow the public to elect candidates directly rather than via lists "after men grant it." Indeed, Mr. Prime Minister, this cannot be.

From the World Economic Forum's 2007 summit in Istanbul, I reported a stance reversal on quotas quietly uttered by the AKP’s lone female cabinet member, State Minister for Women and Family Affairs Nimet Çubukçu. But she added that Erdoğan’s "boys’ club" of late meetings made it hard for women to take part. Why, I wondered. Then I heard Burhan Kuzu, AKP president of the parliamentary constitutional committee, rebuff the quota system by calling Parliament work "hard". "We often work after midnight. A woman returning that late from work will not be looked upon with decency," he said.

Poised between their conservative Islamic roots and entrance in the EU, the AK Party is trying to keep women in headscarves and out of politics. Unless they extend the opportunity to serve the public to all people, this cavalier disregard for women - covered and uncovered - will continue to stain the honor of the electorate.