Gender Perceptions of Women of Different Social Categories

This article aims at examining the attitude and behaviour of two different categories of women in Turkey regarding womanhood roles, and identifying the similarities and differences. The purpose is to analyse to what extent the women with certain qualities –education, financial independence, career etc. which are thought and emphasized to be necessary in achieving equality – differ from the women who do not have such qualities in realising equality and breaking the gender-based labour division. In order to compare the perception of these two categories of women, face-to-face interviews were held with 26 women of middle-upper socio-cultural structure having at least a university degree, holding prestigious positions in work on one hand, and 26 women of lower socio-cultural structure, at most high-school graduate, employed in lower levels of hierarchy, on the other. The outcome of these interviews is that the underlying structure basically remains the same although there are divergences between two women categories. This underlying structure is traditional gender-based definitions of man and woman and labour division thereof.