Sevdil Yaldirim met with the Turkish furniture makers’ owners two years ago and made a confession. They wanted her to be the chief executive, but were concerned that a female boss wouldn’t be taken seriously in this sector.
“I loved it because they were honest,” says Ms Yildirim, who had served on the company’s board. “Most people don’t say these things openly, they make excuses.”
Six months later, AGT Industry and Trade owners decided to take the plunge and appoint her anyway. AGT has seen a significant increase in export destinations and production capacity under her leadership.
Ms Yildirim has been a leader in a country that sees female participation in the labour force steadily increasing, even though it started at a low level. This includes sectors that often struggle with women such as engineering and sciences.
However, she pointed out that women are still not represented at the highest levels of politics, government, and business. “It’s hard to say that we have equal chances to be the main decision makers.”
Turkey has a higher ratio of female scientists and engineers than the European average. Ebru Ozdemir is the chairwoman of Limak Investments in Ankara, a Turkish infrastructure company. She wants to see more women in the field.
Ms Ozdemir created a mentorship program to sponsor 100 young women engineers from Turkey in 2015. Her goal is to help them get into male-dominated areas of the business, particularly energy and cement, as well as on construction sites.
Ms Ozdemir is a civil engineer, having been raised in a family that was engineers. She was appointed to the position of head of the board in 2010, which she co-founded with her father in 1976. Limak companies employ approximately 60,000 people.
She has two children now aged eight and ten years. Her son was born while she was working on-site on the construction of Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen airport, and she returned to work a week after his birth. “My mother was joking that . . . we should have called him Sabiha.”
Ms Ozdemir concedes she is lucky — as a senior executive she can afford “a lot of help”. For the young women on the mentoring scheme without such resources, her “biggest fear” is that they will drop out if they get married and have children. “We have to make the utmost effort for them not to leave,” she says. Plans involve reviews of the company’s gender pay gap and work-life balance.
Analysts blame a shortage of affordable childcare for Turkey’s persistent laggards in female participation in the labor force. It had the lowest rate of female participation in the group of wealthy countries, at 34% in 2018. According to the OECD it is eighth in the list of countries with the lowest female representation on boards of publicly traded companies. However, it performs better than many emerging markets peers.
Yet Gunes Asik, an assistant professor of economics at Ankara’s TOBB University of Economics and Technology, says she is “positive” about the underlying trend. Turkey’s headline statistics are distorted by underemployment among older women, she says. “Younger generations have more skills, they are more open to [the idea of] work.”
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who came to power in 2002, regularly provokes criticism by women’s rights organisations for his frequent appeals to women to have at least three children and for describing those who are not mothers as “incomplete”.
The president has overseen a huge expansion of university places, which has resulted in greater female employment. He also lifted the ban against wearing a headscarf at universities, which was prohibitive for women from conservative backgrounds.
It will be critical to further change that men, especially those from traditional backgrounds, have a positive attitude.
That is why Nur Ger, the 63-year-old founder of Istanbul-based fashion producer Suteks Group, decided two years ago to set up Yanindayiz (“we are at your side”). It aims to bring men into the conversation on women’s rights. She says the primary obstacle to greater equality in Turkey is a “patriarchal mindset” that harms not just women but also men.
Ms Ger, who started Suteks in 1986, has recruited a string of high-profile male business leaders, journalists, lawyers and other professionals to talk about equality and women’s rights with their peers. They give “barbershop” talks to young people about patriarchy and violence against women, and campaign for regulatory and social change.
She is not pleased with the enormity of the task, but she believes attitudes are changing rapidly.
She was stunned on a recent visit to an outdoor café in a conservative district of Istanbul, when one “macho-looking” man was giving his baby a bottle while a male friend played with his young daughter. The mothers were nowhere in sight.
“You couldn’t see that 20 years ago — not even 10 years ago,” Ms Ger says. “The change is like the boiling of water. Until the boiling point you don’t see it. Then, suddenly, there is steam.”
Source: Financial Times