School to work or school to home? An analysis of women's vocational education in Turkey as a path to employment

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on women's vocational education in Turkey as a gendered and gendering process. Cultural norms about women's role in society, a vocational curriculum that echoes these norms, and a labour market with gender inequalities constitute the background against which women formulate their vocational preferences and seek pathways into the labour market. We use the literatures on gender and vocational education, school-to-work transitions, and gender bargains to analyse data from qualitative fieldwork with students and graduates of girls’ vocational high schools. First, we scrutinize how students choose vocational tracks. Our findings point to the presence of a gendered bounded agency by students and graduates, according to which their choices echo traditional gender norms. Secondly, we discuss the transition from school to work, during which they are faced with gender prejudice in the labour market. Finally, we show how that process turns into a ‘school-to-home’ transition whereby graduates become homemakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education
• school-to-work transition
• bounded agency
• gender bargain
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ayşe Alnıaçık is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of interest are gender, state, class, women's employment, social policy, and gender-based violence. Her dissertation research explores the Turkish state's discourses and practices on gender-based violence.

Fatoş Gökşen is a professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University. She received her Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication in 1996. Her areas of interest are sociology of education, youth studies, and social policy. Her work specifically concentrates on gender inequalities in education, youth unemployment, and gender and social policy.

Deniz Yükseker is a professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul Aydın University. She received her Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology from Binghamton University. Her areas of interest are the informal economy, labour studies, women's employment, and the sociology of migration.

ORCID

Ayşe Alnıaçık http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5789-8398

Notes

1 In this paper, we refer to ‘vocational education for girls’, ‘girls(-only) vocational high schools’ and girls’ and boys’ secondary education, in keeping with both the Turkish education system's official categorization and international usage for education of children between the ages of 14 and 18. But more generally, we speak about women's education and women's employment.

2 The secondary education enrolment rate was 82.4% for girls and 82.7% for boys in the academic year of 2016–2017 up from 34.2% for girls and 41.4% for boys in 1997–1998 (MEB 2017).

3 Women's participation in the labour force in Turkey has always been low compared to global trends. While 34% of working-age women were in the labour force in 1988, this rate declined to 23% over the course of the following decade, returning to 32.5% in 2016. Women's employment rate was 28% in 2016 (TURKSTAT 2017).

4 According to the figures provided by the Ministry of National Education in 2011 when we conducted our research, less than 4% of girls’ vocational high school graduates were admitted into BA programs, whereas the same ratio for general high school graduates was around 32% (Gökşen et al. 2011).

5 We would argue that this is a very strong tendency. While our paper focuses only on women's vocational education, the reproduction of familialism also takes place in other sites such as legislation on women's employment, the delivery of social services (Yazıcı 2012) and mainstream media shows. But we also acknowledge that there are other efforts, such as the work of feminist organisations, which challenge and resist familialist policies and practices, although we do not discuss them here since those activities fall outside the scope of this paper.