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Over a quarter of women in Turkey feel insecure in their neighborhood: TurkStat

Women gesture and hold signs during a demonstration marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women in Istanbul on November 25, 2020. Yasin AKGUL / AFP

The results of a survey released on Friday by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) showed that 27.3 percent of women felt insecure when walking alone at night in their own neighborhood in 2020 in Turkey, where the gruesome murder of women is all too common and some 300 femicides were recorded last year.

A total of 19.1 percent of Turks felt insecure when walking alone at night in their own neighborhood last year, 27.3 percent of women and 10.7 percent of men, TurkStat said in its report titled “Women in Statistics, 2020.”

The proportion of individuals who felt insecure when they were home alone was 4.8 percent in total, including 6.2 percent of females and 3.4 percent of males.

According to the report the female employment rate was less than half that of men in 2019, with 28.7 percent of the women and 63.1 percent of the men constituting the 45.7 percent of people in the country who were 15 years of age and over and employed that year.

Among the individuals living in households with children under the age 3 in 2019, those who were employed – a total of 58.7 percent – corresponded to 26.7 percent of females and 87.3 percent of males living in Turkey.

The report also included data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which revealed that only 25 percent of ambassadors were female, while the remaining 75 percent were male in 2020.

Data received from the Turkish Parliament showed that only 101 of 584 deputies were women in 2020, the report said.

The duration of work life, which is defined by TurkStat as the number of years people aged 15 and over are expected to be active in the labor force throughout their lives, was 19.1 years for women and 39 years for men in 2019.

According to the results of TurkStat’s Address Based Population Registration System (ABPRS), the female population in Turkey was 41,698,377 in 2020, while the male population in the same year was 41,915,985, with women constituting 49.9 percent of the total population.

The ABPRS results also included statistics with regard to the difference in educational levels between spouses, which showed that 40.4 percent of women were married to men who had higher educational levels than them, while the proportion of women who were better educated than their spouses was 15.1 percent in 2019. The proportion of spouses with the same educational levels was 42.9 percent in the same year.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has long been criticized by feminist groups for limiting the civil liberties of women, has also been accused of blatant sexism after declaring in 2014 that women are not equal to men and claiming feminists in Turkey reject the idea of motherhood.

He has also drawn the ire of critics for declaring that every woman in Turkey should have three children to boost population and for proposals to limit abortion rights, morning-after pill and cesarean sections.

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