‘A More Receptive Crowd than Before’: Explaining the World Bank’s Gender Turn in the 2000s

In the mid-2000s, the gender work of the World Bank took a different turn with a new Gender Action Plan. Up until then, gender equality had been on the margins of the World Bank, concentrated around a small number of advocates. This particular articulation of gender took as its tagline ‘gender equality as smart economics’. The Plan attracted three times the original budget of US$24.5 million, and moved gender analysis into new fields of work: labour, work, land and agriculture rather than the more usual areas of health and education. It emerged at a time when gender work was becoming more legitimate in the field of development economics; where World Bank economists were ‘a more receptive crowd than before’. The mid-2000s was also a time when the World Bank was becoming more conscious of its use of media technologies. The article draws on these two elements—economics and the use of media—to suggest the broader environment against which gender agendas take on meaning. Structural shifts in the field of development economics—the dominant discipline at the World Bank—made work on gender more legitimate and credible, and made World Bank staff ‘a more receptive crowd than before’, while the increasing use of media technologies meant the World Bank was conscious of how its work looked to outside audiences. These elements, only loosely related to what we might think of ‘gender’ as a normative agenda, nonetheless, changed what gender meant to many people working within the World Bank

What puts women at risk of violence from their husbands? Findings from a large, nationally representative survey in Turkey.

A large, nationally representative, cross-sectional survey was conducted in Turkey in 2008. In this survey, which used the WHO (World Health Organization) study module on violence, information about lifetime and current violence (past 12 months) was obtained using weighted, stratified, and multistage cluster sampling. This article describes factors associated with physical or sexual violence experienced by ever-married women, aged 15 to 49, from their current or most recent husbands in the 12 months before the survey. Logistic regression analysis is used to describe the risk and protective factors from a considerable range of explanatory variables. The findings confirm that many factors are similar to the experiences of other countries. The physical or sexual violence experienced by ever-married women from their husbands was 15.1%. The violence experienced by women is significantly positively associated with early childhood abuse experiences of both women and their husbands; marriages decided by families or others; husband's behaviors such as drunkenness, adultery, controlling women's behavior, and preventing contact with women's family and friends. The age of the women, their contribution to the household income, support from women's families, women's acceptance of male authority, and nonpartner violence experience as well as regional differentials also affect the risk of violence. No significant associations were found with the employment status of women and men or education difference. This study, as one of the largest surveys ever conducted on the issue of domestic violence using face-to-face interviews, demonstrated how the patriarchal family structure still affects women's lives in Turkey. This is particularly significant, given Turkey's setting between traditional and modern values

Religion and discrimination in the workplace in Turkey

Discrimination based on grounds such as gender or disability has been widely studied in recent research, but the issue of discrimination on grounds of religion or belief has proven to be far less traceable, less studied and more ideologically charged. In Turkey, a state discourse stating that 99% of the population is comprised of Muslim citizens conceals religious diversity in the country. Our contribution focuses on two main manifestations of discrimination within this framework: discrimination on the basis of wearing a headscarf in (or outside) the workplace and discrimination based on religious affiliation, specifically beliefs other than the majority Sunni-Hanefite Islam, in particular Alevis and non-Muslim minorities. Since there are a number of recent studies dealing with the issue of the headscarf, our primary focus will be on the latter topic. Our findings suggest that in the Turkish case, while the headscarf has dominated the issue of discrimination on religious grounds, a more egregious discrimination takes place against members of belief groups other than the Sunni-Hanefite majority. The issue of discrimination in the Turkish workplace on grounds of religion or belief presents interesting questions and challenges. Firstly, in a non-litigate society, discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation is hard to track and quantify. Secondly, recognition of difference does not always lead to pluralism