‘Come on girls, let's go to school’: an effort towards gender educational equity in Turkey

Abstract

In many developing countries, women's education has been a highly prominent issue which is not adequately addressed in their education policies. The participation of female populations in education in most of the developing regions of the world has been much lower than the participation of their male counterparts [UNICEF. 2005a. “Report Card on Gender Parity and Primary Education.” www.unicef.org/turkey]. As a developing country, Turkey engaged in fairly vigorous and determined attempts to address the issues regarding women's education [Aydagül, B. 2008. “No Shared Vision for Achieving Education for All: Turkey at Risk.” Prospects 38 (3): 401–407] owing to the support, incentives, and pressure of the international organisations through various conventions in the last decade. The current paper scrutinises one of these attempts, namely, the campaign called ‘Come on girls, let's go to school’ which was initiated by the Ministry of National Education with the support of United Nations Children's Fund and World Bank, and considerably contributed to the increases in girls' enrolment and attendance rates in rural areas and southeast regions of Turkey. This paper utilises the social equity criteria as its conceptual framework drawing from Levin [1978. “The Dilemma of Comprehensive Secondary School Reforms in Western Europe.” Comparative Education Review 22 (3): 434–451] and Stromquist [2011. Educational Equity [Lecture Notes]. College Park: University of Maryland]. The analysis yields that the girls' education campaign in Turkey addresses to varying extents the criteria of accessibility, probability of enrolment, probability of participation, and length of participation, whereas it fails to meet the standard of educational results.