Erdoğan’s “women’s universities” plan draws ire: “An attempt to create obedient, acceptable women”

By Ovgu Pinar

Who would have thought 19^th century Japan could be a source of inspiration on women’s rights in a 21^st century country? Well, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did, despite a conspicuous temporal, geographical and cultural distance.

When President Erdoğan visited Japan in 2019 for the G20 summit — which featured “women’s empowerment” among its main themes — he came up with an eyebrow-raising project: Women’s universities.

His inspiration was triggered by Mukogawa Women’s University, which awarded him with an honorary doctorate during that trip. At his request, introducing women’s universities in Turkey was included in the 2021 Presidential Annual Program.

Mukogawa is one of about 80 Japanese female-only universities, institutions first established at the end of the 19th century when women had very limited access to education in the country. At the time, education of female students was mostly intended to train them as “obedient wives and good mothers”. After all, it was a country under samurai traditions until the 1860s, which dictated that women belonged in the house.

Mukogawa Women’s University describes the motivation behind its foundation as “nurturing women to develop a combination of high intelligence, noble sentiment, and lofty virtues, and to become constructive members of a peaceful nation and society, in accordance with the ideals upon which our nation was founded.”

Today, however, these universities are reported to be falling out of favor as they have poor scientific achievements, and are regarded to be models that sustain sexist stereotypes by the critics.

Besides, Japan — after more than a century of introducing women’s universities — is not among the top achievers when it comes to gender-based gaps.

Japan came 121^st out of 153 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Gap Index (91^st on educational attainment, 115^th on economic participation and opportunity, 144^th on political empowerment), ranking far behind other advanced economies.

On the same list Turkey ranked 130^th (113^th on educational attainment, 136^th on economic participation and opportunity, 109^th on political empowerment).

So what was it about Japan’s women’s universities that has inspired Erdoğan? The fact that they may help reinforce his socially conservative government’s ideals about women’s place in society and gender segregation, his critics say.

And what constitutes that ideal is no secret. Erdoğan, after his now infamous 2014 speech in which he declared that “You cannot put women and men on an equal footing, it’s against nature” and defining a woman who rejects motherhood as "deficient" and "incomplete” in 2016, repeated the same assertion recently (on 8 March 2021, International Women’s Day), saying “Women are first and foremost mothers”.

The 2021 annual program that introduces women’s universities also envisions an increase in the number of religious publications aimed at solving social problems and efforts to keep the fertility rate high.

Activists criticize the government for putting so-called “traditional family values” ahead of women’s wellbeing and survival, in a country where hundreds of femicides are recorded every year.

Campaign group We Will Stop Femicides reported 300 cases of femicides, and 171 cases of women found dead in suspected murders in 2020. According to OECD data 38% of women in Turkey are subject to physical and/or sexual violence from a partner at least once during their lifetime.

Figures — probably substantially lower than the true numbers — that reflect what the most urgent problems women face really are, rights groups say, and these problems have nothing to do with women’s universities. They argue that segregated universities will only further deepen gender-based inequalities in Turkey.

The Science Academy of Turkey (Bilim Akademisi), an NGO established in 2011 to promote the principles of merit, freedom and integrity, criticizes the project for being “a rejection of egalitarian and secular education”. Its 2018-2019 report on academic freedom states that the women’s universities project “is a model to create universities based on gender discrimination, separating women at university level”, “reinforcing sexist roles instead of advancing academic competencies”.

The Academy also mentions that according to the She Figures 2018 report by the European Commission the proportion of women among doctoral graduates is 54% in Turkey, suggesting there is no problem about women’s access to higher education to justify the establishment of women’s universities.

Opposition parties reject the idea for being detrimental to women’s rights. Aylin Nazlıaka, the chair of the opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) women’s branch, denounced the plan for aiming to create “obedient women”. She called out the irony in trying to imitate 19th century Japan on gender equality.

People’s Democratic Party (HDP) Women's Council Spokeswoman Ayşe Acar Başaran branded the plan an attempt to promote “the state ideology”, by “restricting women to a single field, creating good mothers, good wives: acceptable women”.

Feminist organizations and student groups have been holding protests against gender segregated universities, with banners saying “We don’t want women’s universities”. These organizations launched a Twitter account with the same slogan (Kadın üniversitesi istemiyoruz), where they say, “We know that women’s universities that feed a sexist and heteronormative education system will do nothing but isolate women from society”.

Women and LGBTIQ+ rights group criticize the project not only for being discriminatory and aiming to create “obedient” and “acceptable” women but also for disregarding LGBTIQ+ people.

“We reject the binary gender system that decides who can or cannot go to “women's” universities. Women's universities are a product of policies that attempt to assign gender to individuals and ignore LGBTIQ+ people. We refuse to obey the system of those who only know how to count up to two!”, a joint statement by 20 university student clubs and societies reads.

Although, one may argue, proposing female-only universities might have been a relatively progressive idea more than 100 years ago in Japan, it is hard not to define it reactionary — or anachronistic at best — in today’s Turkey. Turkish Education and Science Workers' Union (Eğitim-Sen) reiterated this view in a statement, saying that Erdoğan’s order to establish women’s universities amounted to a “fatwa”:

“This fatwa is an extension of authoritarian-reactionary patriarchy, advocating the view that women should socialize only with women and men with men, women should serve women and men serve men. It constitutes the first step to confine women to professions based on social gender roles in which they can only serve women in the future, to exclude them from the public social sphere. It is unfair to the struggles of women who, among many hurdles throughout the history, have studied and acquired a profession. It is an assault on their achievements.”