Judith Glover

Highly Qualified Women in the 'New Europe': Territorial Sex Segregation

The proportion of women in highly qualified scientific employment in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic States (CEEC-10) is higher than in western Europe. However, this relatively high representation is counteracted by unequal access to resources. This is illustrated by a new measure, the 'honeypot indicator'. The focus of the EU 'Lisbon strategy' summit on increasing overall numbers of scientists does little to address the key issues of retention and advancement. Although social closure mechanisms may undermine the employment prospects of highly qualified women, the conclusion is that the accession of the CEEC-10 to the 'mainstreaming' of equal opportunities proclaimed by the European Union provides the best hope of improvement for their employment prospects.

Introduction and Background

The focus of this article is on highly qualified women in the CEEC-10, defined here as the eight countries that joined the European Union (EU) in May 2004 (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia) and the two scheduled to join in 2007 (Bulgaria and Romania). High qualifications are defined as at least a first degree in a range of areas of knowledge, from the natural sciences to the humanities, according to ISCED 5 and 6 (UNESCO, 1997). The occupational title 'researchers' is the category used in the OECD Frascati Manual (OECD, 2002). They are defined in the following terms: 'researchers are professionals engaged in the conception or creation of new knowledge, products, processes, methods and systems and also in the management of the projects concerned'. In International Labour Organization (ILO) terms, they are classified as ISCO 2 Professionals: 'occupations whose main tasks require a high level of professional knowledge and experience in the fields of physical and life sciences, or social sciences and humanities'. However, the term 'women scientists' is interchangeably and routinely used in European Commission documents to cover this group of highly qualified women; this article follows suit.

The definition of science used by the Commission and most EU countries (the UK is an exception) is broad, including all areas of organized knowledge: the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and various technologies. This broader concept is the Wissenschaft definition of science. Although the terminology is not always consistent, Commission literature tends to use the label 'science and technology' when applying this broad definition; the natural sciences and associated technological fields tend to be referred to as 'science and engineering'. This article focuses on the broader field, although distinctions are made in the discussion of access to resources in different fields.

In March 2000, the EU Lisbon summit launched a European Research Area (ERA) as a means to the goal of making Europe 'the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world'. The target was to increase expenditure on research to 3 percent of GDP, with a target of 700,000 new research and development (R&D) specialists by 2010. The European Commission recently reported that women are better represented in the highly qualified scientific workforce in the CEEC-10 than in the EU-15, accounting for 38 percent of the scientific workforce (EC, 2003a). The proportion ranges from 52 percent in Latvia to 27 percent in the Czech Republic, as against an average for the EU-15 of 27 percent.

The argument in this article is that there is, however, little evidence of the mainstreaming of gender equality for women scientists in the CEEC-10, and this absence puts at risk the ERA aim of building the scientific human resources of Europe. While the number of women scientists is a positive sign for the ERA in its bid to increase capacity, the conditions under which they are working are likely to undermine that capacity.

The high numbers of CEEC-10 women scientists can be seen as a residue of the communist regime, where women and men had equal rights to and indeed obligations of full-time employment, as well as equal access to education. Childcare facilities, legal protection, and various forms of support for working mothers were supplied by the state. In the communist era, public-sector science and technology were privileged in resource terms and men were well represented there (EC, 2003a). A particular effect of the transition between communism and a market economy was that state funding allocated to science declined sharply, in part as a consequence of the disappearance of the military and associated industries. Unemployment followed, with a consequent brain drain, primarily of men. Although this change affected both women and men scientists, women were left in a more vulnerable situation (EC, 2003a). With the privileging of the market economy, public-sector science became low status and particularly poorly resourced. Currently, its personnel are mainly women. Those men who remain in the public sector tend to be older (probably because older men tend to be unattractive to, and unattracted by, the risky new environment of the market economy). They are also typically employed in privileged positions: there is strong evidence of vertical sex segregation in higher education employment (EC, 2003b), as well as more generally between 'researcher ' and 'technician' posts (Eurostat, 2004). This segregation is explored in a later section. The historical background and the gender effects as the funding regime changed are presented schematically in Table 1.

The main focus of this article is not the long-debated and largely unresolved issue of whether high rates of feminization bring about the low status of an occupation or field, or whether women join an occupation that is already of low status, although Table 1 throws some light on this. The 'chain of events' here is that when public-sector science was well funded and enjoyed high status, the numbers of men were high. When funding was drastically reduced, status fell and opportunities shifted to the private sector; the numbers of men in publicly funded science fell, bearing out the theory of gender queues proposed by [START_REF] Reskin | Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Inroads into Male Occupations[END_REF]. Thus, the large numbers of women in scientific employment in the post-communist era is associated with low status, but it does not appear to have been its cause.

The European Research Area

The ERA, first mooted at the Lisbon Summit in 2000 and elaborated by the European Commission, reflects a concern that the gap between European funding of R&D and that of the US and Japan has been widening (EC, 2003c: 4). The Commission attributes this to low investment by the private sector, which in Europe provides only 56 percent of the total financing of research, as against more than two-thirds in the US and Japan (EC, 2003d). The EU as a whole spent only 1.94 percent of GDP on R&D in 2000, compared to 2.80 percent in the USA and 2.98 percent in Japan. Moreover, this 'investment gap' has widened rapidly since the mid-1990s. In terms of purchasing power, the EU-US divide increased markedly, from €43 billion in 1994 to €83 billion in 2000; and although the EU produces a larger number of graduates and PhDs in science and technology than the US and Japan, it employs fewer researchers: 5.4 per 1000 of the labour force, against 8.7 in the US and 9.7 in Japan (EC, 2003d). This implies a poor return on the costs of education. There is also specific concern about a slowdown in growth: the growth rates in the EU-15 of both overall investment and overall performance in the knowledge-based economy were markedly lower in 2000-01 than during the second half of the 1990s (EC, 2003d).

A key aspect of the ERA is the expectation set out in 2002 at the European Council in Barcelona that all countries should spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D by 2010 (EC, 2003c). Several of the EU-15 are close to this, although some, particularly the Mediterranean countries, are further away. However, many of the new member states are far from achieving this target: Latvia spends only 0.48 percent (EC, 2003a). The 3-percent target includes a clear emphasis on private-sector funding: two-thirds is expected to come from this sector. I will come back to this point, arguing that this is a structural aspect that undermines women's employment prospects.

The ERA contains two main aims relating to women scientists. The first can be seen as explicitly related to the bottom line of productivity, while the second, sometimes referred to as the 'democratic principle' (EC, 2003e), is concerned with the moral arguments for equal opportunities.

The first of these addresses women as a major untapped pool that could bring about the intended growth in the knowledge economy. 'Women are an under-exploited resource in research for the European Union and have a huge potential for the future of research in Europe' (EC, 2004: 47). Commissioner for Research Philippe Busquin specifically linked the employment of women scientists to the 3-percent target and the related 2010 objective of a further 700,000 researchers, referring to retention and advancement as well as recruitment (and thus implicitly acknowledging the 'democratic principle' of equal opportunities): 'we will not reach the 3 percent objective if we fail to recruit, retain and promote the women who constitute an important share of Europe's pool of trained scientists' (EC, 2003b: 5).

A second aspect of the ERA that concerns us here is the stated bid to make research more attractive to underrepresented groups, particularly women, and to increase their retention (EC, 2003a: 11) by providing 'favourable career development prospects' and 'mainstreaming gender equality' (EC, 2003a: 12). The basis of many of the ERA activities, including the Framework Programmes, is an emphasis on mobility within Europe in order to improve the knowledge and skills base (EC, 2001). I return to this briefly in the concluding discussion.

Territorial Sex Segregation

The term 'territorial sex segregation' was used by [START_REF] Rossiter | Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940[END_REF][START_REF] Rossiter | Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940-1972[END_REF] in her studies of women scientists in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. She primarily uses it to describe the way in which highly qualified women were employed in low-status and low-paid enclaves within scientific fields. In a broad sense, this means the same as horizontal segregation: both concepts seek to describe and measure the proportions of women and men in sub-occupations, occupations, fields, and sectors. In this article, I prefer the term 'territorial' to 'horizontal' for two reasons. The first is simply an issue of semantics: the term itself is more intuitive and for teaching purposes students appear to understand it readily. A second reason relates more to theory: 'territorial segregation' can be used rather more explicitly to designate different levels of spatiality. The emphasis on borders (and thus inclusion and exclusion) draws attention to the existence of enclaves in a way that the term 'horizontal' does not. It is thus particularly apt when discussing the theoretical perspective of social closure as a possible explanation of women's employment patterns; I refer to this briefly in the concluding discussion.

Within countries, different levels of territorial segregation can be identified: broad occupations, industries and fields of expertise, sectors and sub-occupations (small fields within occupations). The occupational level is perhaps the most common way that horizontal (territorial) segregation is used; following [START_REF] Hakim | ISCO-88: The International Standard Classification of Occupations 1988[END_REF], calculations are typically made, using standardized occupational typologies, of over-and underrepresentation of women and men in broad occupational groups. Also of interest is segregation in broad fields of expertise: women concentrated in medical, agricultural and social sciences. In sectoral segregation, the key distinction is between the public sector, typically divided in the available European statistics into government and higher education employment, and the private sector, referred to as the business and enterprise sector.

The sub-occupational level draws attention to the phenomenon of an occupation that does not appear to be sex segregated in aggregate terms, but can be shown to have high levels of sex segregation within it.

These 'niches' can show very different proportions of women and men. Clear examples here are medicine and law [START_REF] Crompton | Gender Relations and Employment: The Impact of Occupation[END_REF][START_REF] Epstein | The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Lives, Family, and Gender[END_REF]Riska and Wegar, 1993;Schultz and Shaw, 2003). The extent to which these different levels can be operationalized depends, of course, upon the availability of data. For example, it would be particularly interesting to know the representation of women and men in subfields that the Commission identifies as showing clear growth, such as information and communication technologies (ICTs), nanotechnology, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals [START_REF] Ec | Key Figures 2003-2004: Towards a European Research Area[END_REF]. Information at a subfield level is not readily available, since the classification of fields of science, the Frascati Manual (OECD, 2002), does not currently disaggregate to this level of detail.

Although the main focus in this article is on broad fields of expertise and sectors, vertical sex segregation is also examined in the following section, which deals with the current employment conditions for women scientists in the CEEC-10.

Current Conditions: Vertical Sex Segregation

Available European data on vertical sex segregation relate almost exclusively to employment in higher education. The countries under scrutiny here show that men are on average three times more likely than women to be in 'Grade A' positions (the category of 'full professor'), and five times more likely in the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and Slovakia. The average figure is similar to the EU-15 (EC, 2003b: 64); I briefly return to the broad European similarities at the end of this article. There is a need for caution about the figures, since the definitions of different grades vary to some degree cross-nationally. These data come from the Helsinki Group of Statistical Correspondents, a group convened by the Women in Science Unit of the Science and Society Directorate of the European Commission, and composed of senior civil servants responsible for women and science in their country, together with statisticians nominated by each national statistics agency. 1 A second, more general measure of vertical sex segregation is the Eurostat distinction between 'researcher' and 'technician' (OECD, 2002). Eurostat (2004) shows that women are considerably more likely than men to be in technician jobs, despite being similarly qualified. This picture of overqualification is also noted for women in science, engineering, and technology in the UK [START_REF] Fielding | Gender and Science, Engineering and Technology[END_REF] and the US [START_REF] Etzkowitz | Athena Unbound: The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology[END_REF][START_REF] Rossiter | Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940[END_REF][START_REF] Rossiter | Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940-1972[END_REF].

One consequence of vertical segregation is, of course, the pay gap. Data on pay are currently exceptionally sparse, but the ILO Laborsta database of selected occupations is one source. From this, I have selected two science and engineering occupations (here using the narrower definition of science, as explained earlier): a mathematics lecturer in higher education, largely to be found in the public sector, and a chemical engineer, more likely to be in the private sector, particularly in view of the increase in the number of privately funded universities in the CEE and the Baltic States (EC, 2003c: 56). This shift of employment to the private sector appears to be particularly significant in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

These data need to be treated with some caution, in particular because there is no firm evidence that these occupations are representative of the public and private sectors, respectively. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to treat these as indicative, until more systematic data become available. There is evidence of a gender pay gap, sometimes marked, in both of these occupations, though the size of this gap is greater in some countries in the public sector and in others, in the private (see Table 2). In terms of overall pay levels, however, the occupation that is more likely to be in the private sector (chemical engineer) pays in almost all cases consistently better than the public-sector higher education job. This is an important point, since as discussed later, women are considerably less likely to be in private-sector employment than men. The differences between earnings in the EU-15 and CEEC-10 are not a focus of this article, but the average earnings for the two selected occupations in the lowest-paid EU-15 country, Portugal, have nevertheless been included. These show a similar pattern of inequality, though at a far higher level of income.

It is not a main purpose of this article to address the evolution of the pay gap from communism to the market economy; this is particularly difficult to establish because of patchy data availability and possible discrepancies between communist and post-communist data-collection systems and techniques. Nevertheless, the ILO database gives some limited indication of more recent trends. The higher education mathematics teacher is the only relevant occupation for which time-series data are available and only for two countries: Latvia and Romania (see Table 3). These take us from the end of the transition period to the market economy, showing that the pay gap in these two countries is widening over time. This provides further (albeit limited) evidence that women's employment opportunities in the market economy are a matter for concern. This leads to a consideration of contemporary territorial sex segregation in scientific employment at sectoral and field levels in the market economy. The link with gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) provides new evidence of the consequences of sex segregation in terms of the distribution of resources.

Territorial Sex Segregation: Sectors and Fields

Turning first to the sectoral level: 47 percent of GERD in the CEEC-10 goes to the business and enterprise sector, with the remainder being split approximately equally between the government and higher education sectors (EC, 2003a: 79). Yet, 84 percent of women researchers in these countries work in the latter two sectors (EC, 2003a: Table 3.1). Furthermore, the prospects for women look set to deteriorate, since the sectors where women are concentrated show the greatest decrease in resources. It is a particularly important point that the 3-percent target in the ERA specifies that two-thirds of R&D spending should be in the private sector, where women are least well represented. Furthermore, there is evidence from Commission statistics that the representation of women researchers in the private sector is decreasing, from 31 percent in 1999 to 25 percent in 2002 (calculated from http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/sciencesociety/women/wssi/downstat_en.html). Data need to be treated with caution here, however, since the publicly available time series covers only these four years; it is possible that 1999 is a 'blip'.

A more detailed disaggregation shows that women tend to be concentrated in those fields of expertise where resources in the form of infrastructure, equipment, and pay are least available. The highest level of resourcing is found in science and engineering (the narrow definition of the knowledge economy, as shown earlier) and the lowest level is in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. In the countries examined here, 23 percent of researchers in engineering are women, and the annual per capita R&D expenditure for researchers in engineering is €18,500; 43 percent of social science researchers are women, yet the R&D per capita expenditure here is €7200 (EC, 2003c: Tables 3.5, 3.7). This effect is compounded by the sectoral location of these fields: social sciences are largely concentrated in the poorly resourced higher education sector, while engineering is located mainly in the relatively well-resourced business and enterprise sector.

The consequences of these forms of territorial segregation can be explored in terms of access to resources. A new measure, the 'honeypot indicator', has been developed by statisticians in the Commission's Science and Society Directorate and by Eurostat (EC, 2003c;Eurostat, 2004). This establishes the extent to which women miss out on available resources (infrastructure, equipment, and pay) by measuring the relationship between GERD and the concentrations of women and men in both sectors and fields of R&D. It is based on two measures of per capita expenditure for women: an expected value and an observed value. The expected value is calculated by dividing total R&D expenditure by the overall proportion of women scientists. The observed value is calculated by dividing the amount of R&D expenditure in each sector or field of science by the proportion of women in that sector or field, and then summing these amounts. The 'honeypot' score is the difference (the observed minus the expected) between these values expressed as a percentage of the expected value.

As an example, women researchers in the Czech Republic miss out on around 16 percent of the per capita share of R&D expenditure. Using Eurostat ( 2004) figures, all things being equal, women researchers in the Czech Republic could be expected to attract €223.3 million of GERD. However, they are only observed to attract €186.7 million. The difference between the expected and observed amounts, expressed as a percentage of the expected value, results in a sector score of 16.4 percent.

Discussion and Conclusion

At first sight, the 'women and science' issue in the EU-15 (persistently low representation of women and evidence of vertical segregation in higher education employment, as documented in EC [2000, 2003e]) appears to be less serious in the CEEC-10, since there the representation of women scientists is high. However, a more detailed examination, provided previously, suggests that here too, highly qualified women are losing out on new opportunities in the European knowledge economy.

To summarize, the available evidence reveals a picture of vertical sex segregation, a consistent pay gap and territorial sex segregation. In relation to the latter, this relates to both sectors and fields, and possibly an interaction between the two. Women are heavily concentrated in public-sector science, but the majority of funding goes to the private sector; and indeed, the ERA insists that two-thirds of GERD should be in this sector. In all of these countries, the growing and relatively wellresourced business and enterprise sector has the lowest representation of women. The least well-resourced (and increasingly badly resourced) sectors (government-funded science and higher education employment) have the highest representation of women. There is a gendered allocation of resources. This picture has caused the Commission to conclude as follows: 'women are being used as a kind of secondary human resource . . . because the reward system is no longer sufficiently attractive [to men]' (EC, 2003a: 84).

Why, since the ERA emphasizes the private sector and this is the main target of funding, do women not switch to those sectors that offer the best opportunities? The Commission acknowledges women's agency: their location in the more stable, but poorly paid, publicly funded science may be a strategy of women 'choosing to work here in order to support their families with at least one stable income in the new competitive and risky environment' (EC, 2003a: 77). At a structural level, a key feature of the post-communist era is a lack of appropriate welfare policies that would ease the relationship between domestic and working lives. This particularly affects women because the domestic division of labour remains as traditional in the market economy as it was under communism, and possibly even more so (EC, 2003a;[START_REF] Kocourková | Leave Arrangements and Childcare Services in Central Europe: Policies and Practices Before and After the Transition[END_REF][START_REF] Lobodzinska | Proposed Standard Practice for Surveys on Research and Experimental Development: Frascati Manual[END_REF][START_REF] Pascall | Gender and Social Policy: Comparing Welfare States in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union[END_REF].

Social closure theory has played a particularly important role in explaining women's employment patterns in the professions, both historically and contemporaneously. It has been used particularly effectively by [START_REF] Witz | Professions and Patriarchy[END_REF] to explain the history of women's exclusion from medicine in the UK. She concludes that dominant groups in occupations or sectors that are growing in status, or seeking to professionalize, can sustain their position by constructing exclusionary boundaries with related or adjacent occupations. This creates for particular social groups distinct spheres of competence that relate to different levels of prestige. Women are not excluded completely from occupations or fields, since to do so would be to deny their qualifications, but they are contained in particular enclaves. This process, which I refer to as 'contained inclusion' (and which [START_REF] Witz | Professions and Patriarchy[END_REF] calls 'demarcationary closure'), denotes the incorporation of women into sectors or occupations in a particular set of circumstances and occupational locations, typically of low status and low pay and, importantly, in 'behind-the-scenes' positions that lack visibility.

Applying this theoretical framework to the situation of women scientists in the CEEC-10, it can be expected that private-sector employment will be problematic for women, since it has become the destination of choice for men scientists. It is likely that women will occupy a limited range of positions in the developing private sector, illustrating a particular type of territorial segregation, that of 'contained inclusion' in subfields within broad areas. This prediction can be related to the work of [START_REF] Rossiter | Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940[END_REF][START_REF] Rossiter | Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940-1972[END_REF], who describes how the rapidly growing biological sciences in the mid-20th-century US required pre-computer taxonomic (cataloguing) work. Highly qualified and largely overqualified women typically found work here. Since their numbers were often high, a calculation of their numerical representation within the biological sciences would have shown a 'good' result. Yet, the reality, as in the CEEC-10, was that their pay and prospects were poor, since highly qualified women worked primarily as technicians. As we have seen, evidence from the CEEC-10 reveals the same pattern.

As noted earlier, in its presentation of the ERA, the Commission placed considerable emphasis on mobility within Europe as a means to improve the knowledge and skills base of the knowledge economy (EC, 2001). This policy is in line with the traditional view of the 'itinerant' scientist [START_REF] Glaser | Organizational Scientists: Their Professional Careers[END_REF]. In line with this objective, grants for mobility within Europe have increased markedly, and the Commission has developed information networks such as the Researcher's Mobility Portal. How will this affect women? Although we could make an educated guess, given the well-documented relationship between women's employment and domestic activities, there is to date only patchy evidence here. On the basis of a UK-Italy comparison, [START_REF] Ackers | Mobility and Excellence in Scientific Labour Markets: The Question of Balanced Growth[END_REF] conclude that while women are more likely than men to study outside their home country as undergraduates through the ERASMUS programme, this mobility declines at the postgraduate level. Thus the 'brain drain' may be a primarily male phenomenon, and this could be a further factor in women 'propping up the R&D remains that are of little interest to men' (EC, 2003a: 84).

Although the representation of women scientists in the CEEC-10 is higher than in the EU-15, similar characteristics are found in both regions, as a series of Commission reports has shown (EC, 2000(EC, , 2003d)). The representation of women in private-sector research in the EU-15 is considerably lower than that of men: in the 10 countries that provide disaggregated data, women make up between 9 and 28 percent of privatesector researchers, with an average of 15 percent; in Germany, with by far the largest number of private-sector researchers, the proportion is 9.6 percent (EC, 2003e: 15-16). Because of women's concentration in other sectors, the 'honeypot indicator' calculation shows women scientists losing out on 24 percent of the per capita share of R&D expenditure in Spain, 20 percent in Finland, 16 percent in Belgium, 10 percent in Denmark, and 9 percent in Germany (Eurostat, 2004: Table 2). In higher education, there is clear vertical sex segregation, measured by the percentage of women who are 'full professors': this ranges from 5 percent in the Netherlands to 18 percent in Finland (EC, 2000).

All EU-15 and CEEC-10 countries show poor female retention rates, from education through to employment (EC, 2000(EC, , 2003d)). This implies that women are initially interested in natural sciences, but that subsequently this interest wanes. In the UK, calculations from the 2001 Labour Force Survey show that at any one time 50,000 women with science, engineering, and technology degrees were not in paid work; of these, only half can be expected to return to paid work, of whom only a third will take science-based jobs, often in 'associate professional' technician jobs for which they are overqualified (DTI, 2002).

These figures imply that it is inadequate to focus on the numbers of women, without regard to the conditions, in terms of structure and culture, under which they work. I have argued elsewhere [START_REF] Glover | Women and Scientific Employment[END_REF][START_REF] Glover | Targeting Women: Policy Issues Relating to Women's Representation in Professional Scientific Employment[END_REF]) that a major weakness of the many debates and subsequent campaigns to improve the 'women and science' situation is a concentration on increasing the numbers of women scientists to some point at which it is thought that a critical mass will have been achieved. Thus women themselves are the focus of these campaigns, with the institutional (cultural) aspects of scientific education and scientific employment typically receiving little scrutiny. The emphasis on critical mass is a similar problem with the ERA. The target refers to numbers, in which respect the CEEC-10 is doing rather better than the EU-15. However, as I have shown in this article, once the detail of this overall picture is examined, there is considerable evidence that the 'women and science' problem has not been resolved. The relatively high numbers are largely a residue of structural and institutional aspects of the communist era, and their significance cannot be interpreted without reference to the conditions under which women work. In the long run, 'contained inclusion' will have economic consequences for the ERA, because the quality of R&D will suffer as a result of women working for low pay in poor conditions. Another aspect of the ERA, the desire to give highly qualified women 'favourable career prospects' (EC, 2003c), is far from being achieved. Any future 'women and science' policy needs to focus much more on the conditions under which retention and advancement can take place, as well as on increasing recruitment. [START_REF] Rees | Mainstreaming Equality in the European Union[END_REF] refers to the need, termed 'visioning', to understand how existing practices, cultures and institutional arrangements disadvantage one sex over the other. The Greenfield Report on employment of women scientists in the UK concluded that there is a need for more research that provides a better understanding of scientific cultures (Greenfield, 2002: 29). Unusually for official reports on the 'women and science problem', the report draws attention to the concept of 'institutionalized sexism'. Greenfield (2002: 29) concludes that 'overt discrimination' is not the prime reason for women not entering scientific careers or drifting away from them. Rather, it is 'the perception and reality of the workplace, coupled with a systematic set of policies and processes that work together to create a culture that excludes or marginalizes women'. Perhaps predictably, the concept of institutionalized sexism did not figure in the government's response to the report, which steered away from examining explanations, preferring to focus on the establishment of a resource centre that would work with science, engineering, and technology employers and professional bodies to identify 'good practice' (DTI, 2003). It is too early to say whether this approach will go beyond the traditional emphasis on increasing numbers.

The argument in this article is that there is as yet little evidence of gender equality for women scientists in the 'New Europe', and that this threatens to undermine the ERA objective of building the scientific human resources of Europe. Thus, the numbers of women scientists appear at first glance to be a positive sign for the ERA in its bid to increase capacity, but the conditions under which they are working are likely to undermine that capacity. The 'bottom line' of productivity is more likely to have firm foundations when it is combined with the 'democratic principle' of equal opportunities; the potential of this relatively 'untapped' pool of highly qualified women might then be realized.

However, if social closure perspectives, briefly introduced above, have at least some explanatory purchase, structural improvements that give priority to retention and advancement issues are unlikely to be successful. The essence of 'contained inclusion' is that it is in the interest of the privileged group to do little or nothing about improving opportunities for the less privileged group. Nevertheless, it seems important to avoid a counsel of despair and possible oversimplification of the issue through reliance on one theoretical perspective only. It seems at least possible to devise certain types of policies that have the potential to circumvent the unwillingness of privileged groups to dismantle occupational boundaries. As Pollert (in this issue, 2005) argues (nevertheless, with caveats about the way that these countries have satisfied EU accession requirements), the accession of the CEEC-10 to the European Union places these countries in the policy context of the mainstreaming of equal opportunities. This may prove to be the best chance for a gradual improvement in women's employment prospects in these countries.

Glover: Highly Qualified Women in the 'New Europe' 233 TABLE 1. The Funding of Science in the Move from Communism to a Market Economy and the Representation of Women and Men

	Communist era	Transition era	Market economy
	Natural sciences	Science poorly	Public-sector	Private-sector
	well resourced;	resourced, loses science poorly	science better
	higher education	status	resourced	resourced, with
	and (public-sector)			increasingly good
	R&D have high			prospects
	status
	Large numbers of Declining	Low numbers of	High numbers of
	men	numbers of men men, high numbers young men, low
			of women; older	numbers of women
			men in higher
			positions

Glover: Highly Qualified Women in the 'New Europe' 237 TABLE 2. Women's and Men's Average Monthly Earnings in ILO Occupations 145 and 52, 2001

	Country	HE mathematics lecturer	Chemical engineer
		Women (% of male) Men	Women (% of male)	Men
	Latvia	€358 (81)	€439	€359 (80)	€450
	Lithuania a	€373 (75)	€494	€461 (61)	€759
	Poland	€544 (79)	€688	€671 (85)	€786
	Romania	€173 (77)	€223	€197 (83)	€238
	Slovakia	€294 (91)	€322	€409 (77)	€533
	Portugal	€1309 (98)	€1341	€1558 (72)	€2167

Note: a 2000. Source: calculated from ILO Laborsta DataBase (www.laborsta.ilo.org) for countries that disaggregate data by sex.

TABLE 3 . Women's Pay as a Percentage of Men's in ILO Occupation 145, Latvia and Romania, 1997-2001

 3

		1997	1998	1999	2000	2001
	Latvia	91	91	87	81	81
	Romania	86	84	76	84	77

Source: calculated from ILO Laborsta DataBase (www.laborsta.ilo.org) for countries that disaggregate data by sex.

European Journal of Industrial Relations 11(2)

The data supplied by this group are available at http://europa.eu.int/comm/ research/science-society/women/wssi/downstat_en.html as the WiS database. Some have been published inEC (2003a,

2003b).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

An earlier version of this article was presented to the Work, Employment and Society conference, Manchester, September 2004. I acknowledge Colette Fagan's particularly useful comments. NOTE


Geraldine Healy

Mustafa Özbilgin

Hanife Aliefendiog

Academic Employment and Gender: A Turkish Challenge to Vertical Sex Segregation

This article explores the paradox of women's academic employment in Turkey. There is a low rate of female labour market participation in the formal sector, yet a higher proportion of women professors than in any of the 25 European Union countries. We use a range of data to set the Turkish labour market and its higher education sector in comparative European perspective, then present findings from two qualitative studies of Turkish professors, concluding that ideological state support rather than legal frameworks of equal opportunities laid the foundations for women's hierarchical achievements in Turkey. However, the explanation is multilayered and lies in the cumulative and interrelated effect of state policy, institutional transparency, increased labour demand, the home-work interface, and the agency of the professors themselves.

Introduction

At the end of 2004, the EU agreed to open accession talks which could lead to Turkey's membership of the Union. Its candidacy, if successful, would realize the key national project of modernization and westernization, which has been central to Turkey's dominant state ideology. Turkey is often excluded from comparative studies of European employment, yet there are good reasons to include it.

There are important paradoxes in employment relations in Turkey: women have one of the lowest rates of employment participation in Europe, yet some benefit from limited vertical segregation which would be envied by their European sisters. In particular, women achieve more hierarchically in the professions and academia than their contemporaries in western Europe and elsewhere [START_REF] Acar | Women and University Education in Turkey[END_REF].

Across the industrialized world, feminist, human rights and civil liberties movements have achieved legal solutions for the elimination of discrimination against women. In practice, the impact of antidiscriminatory legislation is often limited to widening women's access to employment, but has had less success in challenging vertical segregation.

In Turkey, by contrast, anti-discrimination legislation is less advanced, but vertical segregation is lower. We examine this paradox by comparing patterns of women's activity rates in Europe with those of Turkey; then focus specifically on academic employment. To understand what these macro and meso data mean at the level of the actor (that is, the lived experience of professorial employment), we use qualitative studies of professors in Turkish universities.

To situate Turkey in its international context, we use Turkish data from the Directorate General of Women's Status and Problems in Ankara and EU data from Eurostat and from Women in Science. To gain insight into the policies and regulations on Turkish academic employment in general and conditions of advancement to full professorial posts in particular, documentary data were obtained from YÖK (the governing body of the Turkish higher education sector) and the State Institute of Statistics. Lastly, we undertook two qualitative studies, involving 57 semistructured interviews of Turkish full professors (30 men and 27 women). The research was limited to 'full' professors, defined as academic workers holding professorial chairs at universities subject to YÖK's progression criteria. They were drawn from six universities in Istanbul and five in Ankara, since professors in these cities face fewer structural constraints associated with their geographical career mobility.

The interview schedule consisted of 32 questions exploring the socioeconomic and institutional profiles of the respondents and allowing them a degree of freedom to determine the issues that they wished to discuss within a broad framework of sex equality, career development, and higher education in Turkey. Interviews were undertaken in Turkish and the transcripts translated into English.

Women's Activity Rates: Turkey in Comparative Perspective

Turkey has one of the lowest female economic participation rates in Europe -one which actually decreased from 34 percent in 1990 to 23 percent in 1995. The vast majority work in the agricultural sector as unpaid family workers, while employment in the non-agricultural and non-rural sectors is highly marginal not only quantitatively, but also in terms of concentration in traditional female sectors such as textiles and the food industry. Urban unemployment rates for women are more than double those of men; the informal sector provides the greatest work opportunity for urban women from low-income households, which means that they are typically excluded from the legal and social protection and benefits available in the formal sector.

Figure 1 ranks female economic activity rates as a proportion of men's among European countries, showing that Turkey ranks 23rd, above only Cyprus, Italy, Greece, Spain and Malta. The Turkish experience of liberalization has not increased women's participation in the labour market; rather, its unplanned nature, coupled with high levels of internal migration from rural to urban areas in the past decade, has led to a skewed distribution of employment by gender [START_REF] Özbilgin | Banking and Gender: Sex Equality in the Financial Services Sector in Britain and Turkey[END_REF].

Male workers in Turkey are over-represented in forms of employment that require lower educational qualifications. Women's relative participation rates increase with their educational levels, and this is particularly marked for those with tertiary-level education. Nevertheless, OECD (2004) data indicate that women with tertiary education still have comparatively low levels of activity: below all other European countries, on a par with Japan, and above only Korea and Mexico.

It is noteworthy that the 12 European countries with the highest activity rates for women are the four Nordic countries and eight of the central and eastern European (CEE) countries. The lowest activity rates tend to be in southern Europe. The extent to which these figures are directly comparable has been questioned by a number of commentators, since different definitions of employment, unemployment, and inactivity significantly affect the data. For example, the southern countries, including Turkey, tend to have a high share of informal-sector work. Within the Eurostat definitions of economic activity, the trend among women is towards increasing employment rates and decreasing inactivity rates [START_REF] Rubery | Women's Employment in Europe[END_REF].

Academic Employment and Gender Equality

Given the very low economic activity rates of Turkish women, and the predominantly Muslim population, it may surprise many western commentators that the proportion of women academics who achieve professorial status is very high [START_REF] Özbilgin | The Gendered Nature of Career Development of University Professors: The Case of Turkey[END_REF][START_REF] Woodward | Ingiltere ve Türkiye'de Firsat Es ¸itlig ˘i[END_REF]. Thus gender equality in Turkish academic employment can provide comparative insights to relate to the findings of other country-specific studies. 1 A prerequisite of women's success in academia is their prior success in tertiary education. In 2002, the average percentage of graduates who were women was 55.9 percent in the EU-15 and 63.7 percent in the accession countries. In science in general and in engineering and manufacturing, there was a higher percentage of women graduates in the accession countries (48 percent and 25.6 percent, respectively) than in the EU-15 (41 percent and 20.9 percent, respectively). Turkey stands out as having a lower proportion of women graduates (42.9 percent) than any of the EU-25 or associated countries. However, the feminized subject bias is less entrenched in Turkey, with women representing 44.4 percent of science graduates and 34.8 percent of those in engineering and manufacturing (Eurostat, 2004). However, [START_REF] Palaz | Gender Segregation in Institutions of Higher Education Employment[END_REF] argues that recent trends indicate a shift towards a more western style of horizontal gender segregation, with women entering the arts, humanities and vocational education in greater numbers than in the past.

Figure 2 shows the average percentage of women academics in the EU-25 as 34.8 percent. There is, however, a wide range, from Latvia, where women make up more than 50 percent of academics to Ireland where they are only 24.6 percent. Of the 13 countries above the mean, six (including the top four) are from the CEE, two (Spain and Portugal) from southern Europe, and three from the Nordic countries, together with the UK. Turkey is also just above the mean. There is no clear pattern by groupings of countries; nor does the gendered distribution of academic employment match national rankings of economic activity rates.

Figure 2 Source: data collated from WiS (2005). Note: data for Romania was not available.

under-represented at professorial level, holding on average only 14 percent of such posts. Some 11 countries are above the mean: four from the CEE (of which only Latvia and Bulgaria have a higher than average proportion of women academics) and four from southern Europe, plus Belgium and the UK. At 27 percent, Turkey has the highest proportion of professors who are women in Europe, almost twice the mean. Curiously, countries with a long history of egalitarian policies, such as Norway and Denmark, are below the mean. Data from the European Technology Assessment Network (ETAN, 2000) show that in many countries the percentage of female full professors slowly increased in the 1990s. In Poland, for example, women were 9.4 percent of titular professors in 1977, 16.6 percent in 1988, 20 percent in 1990, and 21.9 percent in 1996. While these kinds of data are not generally available, its report also provides the example of Germany, where year-on year-increases are not evident. On average in the EU, percentages of women professors seem to be increasing by 0.5-1.0 percent a year -at this rate it would take a century to attain a gender balance (ETAN, 2000: 12).

There are many possible reasons for Turkish women's academic achievements, many rooted in specific historical, social, and economic contexts. Before turning to these, we pursue a more generic explanation: women succeed when men leave an occupation because the rewards are greater elsewhere. Reskin and Roos (1990) argue that men may vacate certain sectors or occupations if terms and conditions of employment decline, and that women can compensate for the resulting labour shortages. While this argument may have some resonance in particular countries, our own research suggests that it does not hold good if the gendered distribution of professorial appointments is compared cross-nationally with academic pay (adjusted for purchasing power) [START_REF] Özbilgin | The Gendered Nature of Career Development of University Professors: The Case of Turkey[END_REF].

Historical Forces and Women's Achievements in Turkey

The dominant state ideology in Turkey has historically been a major factor in understanding vertical segregation, a factor shared with CEE accession countries. The foundation of the new Turkish Republic in the early 1920s led to a series of reforms aiming to nationalize and secularize the higher education sector. The move from the earlier Seljuk and Ottoman systems to the contemporary university system embodied a shift in emphasis from Turkish-Islamic to westernized models, and from a nationalized system to one which is governed by a neo-liberal internationalist approach [START_REF] Güvenç | Türk Kimlig ˘i: Kültür Tarihinin Kaynaklari[END_REF]. These changes can be periodized into three phases.

The first phase, in the 1920s and 1930s, led to the entry of women into academic employment through a set of principles (secularism, republicanism, populism, statism, reformism and nationalism) introduced by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish Republic. These principles were part of a modernization project later synonymous with the concept of 'Kemalism'. The principles were consolidated in the second phase of transformation from the 1940s to the 1980s, as the number of women academics gradually increased (YÖK, 2004). A relatively stable growth rate of the university sector has been replaced since 1985 by a third phase of rapid expansion.

The first two phases underpinned an ideological sanctioning of women's careers in academia and the professions. The Kemalist principles of republican secularism upheld the value of sex equality over and against a strong tradition of sex segregation originating from the Ottoman times [START_REF] Öncü | Turkish Women in the Professions: Why so Many?[END_REF][START_REF] Özkanli | Kadin Akademisyenler[END_REF]. Legislation requiring sex equality in employment was rudimentary [START_REF] Özbilgin | The Way Forward for Equal Opportunities by Sex in Employment in Turkey and Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Woodward | Sex Equality in the Financial Services Sector in Turkey and the UK[END_REF], 2 but of critical importance was that the dominant ideologies of 'modernization' and 'westernization' gave priority to the elimination of overtly discriminatory policies and practices from the formal processes of public employment.

Though the post-communist countries are also shaped by a state ideology of sex equality, the ideological differences with Turkey are profound. James (1996: 45, 59) asserts that under communist rule, women were strongly encouraged to enter the labour force, but that the policies were designed to foster equal numerical participation in the labour force, not equal access to high-status jobs and wages. To facilitate numerical participation, childcare and maternity leave were heavily subsidized by the government (although this subsidy has been substantially reduced in the market economy). This facilitated women's relatively high economic activity rate. Analogous ideological and practical supports also underlie the high participation rates in the Nordic countries.

Zeytinog ˘lu (1999) and [START_REF] Kandiyoti | Cariyeler, Bacilar, Yurttașlar: Kimlikler ve Toplumsal Dönüșümler[END_REF] noted that academic careers were historically and socially constructed and sex-typed as 'safe' and 'proper' choices for graduate women in Turkey. Women were socially encouraged to take up professional employment, as opposed to entrepreneurial or commercial careers, since these were considered harmonious with the potent image of 'a respectful Turkish woman'. This ideology was effective in demarcating women's careers in 'safe', 'secure', and 'esteemed' forms of professional employment.

Neo-Liberalism, the Decline of 'State Feminism', and University Expansion

The transformation of the political and social landscape in Turkey threatens to reverse these equality gains in academia and dissolve the impact of 'state feminism' [START_REF] White | State Feminism, Modernisation and the Turkish Republican Women[END_REF]. First, since the 1980s Turkey has pursued a neo-liberal economic programme, weakening government labour market regulation. This has diluted the traditional sex equality discourse of the republican ideology pursued by the state in all sectors, including higher education. Second, there have emerged political parties and economic institutions that advocate sex segregation, in clear opposition to the principles of secularism. Nevertheless, the current leading party, the AKP, despite its Islamic agenda, has adopted a liberal approach and discourse.

These two changes have led to a shift in social attitudes. The image of republican Turkish women, expected to 'self-sacrifice' and 'pioneer' for the advancement of the nation, has lost its influence on a new generation of young women graduates [START_REF] Özbilgin | Banking and Gender: Sex Equality in the Financial Services Sector in Britain and Turkey[END_REF]. It could be argued that, like their counterparts in other European countries, many women in modern Turkey perceive their careers with individualized aspirations rather than a collectivist sense of fulfilling a national duty. Thus, as the nationalistic and republican significance of women's employment in non-traditional disciplines is declining in Turkey, traditional methods of eliminating sex-typing and segregation of academic careers are following suit in higher education.

Alongside the fragmentation of state ideology, there have been significant sectoral changes in the past two decades. The expansion of the university sector since the early 1990s has created greater opportunities for career mobility for both female and male academics. Between 1990 and 2004, the number of universities increased from 29 to 76; the number of state universities almost doubled and there was also an emergence of private universities. The number of academic staff increased from 28,114 in 1989 to 60,129 in 1999, and professorial posts from 2772 to 8804 in the same period, increasing to 10,080 in 2003 (YÖK, 2004). Between 1990 and 2000 the number of full professors increased by 75 percent (Aytaç and Aytaç, 2001: 17). The skills shortages which resulted from this expansion enabled increased access for women and were also largely responsible for mobilizing the upward progression of the otherwise relatively static careers of many academic staff in this sector.

While student participation has increased in Europe, this increase has not necessarily led to comparable career opportunities, given the shift from 'elite' to 'mass' in higher education delivery. Nevertheless, [START_REF] Enders | Academic Staff in Europe: Changing Employment and Working Conditions[END_REF] argues that academic staff in Portugal and Spain benefited from expansion; and as noted above, these are the two southern European countries with rankings for women's academic employment above the European average.

Expansion of the sector in Turkey occurred alongside a deterioration of pay and conditions in the 'old' universities in the state sector, as compared to the 'new' private universities. It is unclear how the growth of private universities will affect the gender order, given their relatively small share (only 3 percent) in the sector (Aytaç and Aytaç, 2001: 20). Özgüç (1998) suggested that male graduates traditionally pursued careers which offered the best financial prospects and had limited and declining interest in academic careers because salaries were lower than in the private sector. This has resonance with the gender queues argument of Reskin and Roos (1990), which suggests that changing market conditions may lead to the feminizing of previously contested jobs. In the case Turkey, as in Spain and Portugal, it is new jobs that are offering women opportunities.

Centralization of Rule Making: YÖK

One of the influences on women's academic development involves the institutional level. The governance of the university sector has been transformed from a decentralized system in the 1970s to one of centralization, embodied by YÖK, in the 1980s and the 1990s. YÖK and its various policies, which were often considered gender neutral, had a significant gendered impact on the careers of female professors. Particular changes in YÖK legislation, with a direct impact on the career development of academic staff, defined the performance criteria and mobility requirements that regulated professorial promotions. YÖK has been criticized by many universities, academic staff, and their unions and associations (TUSIAD, 2000: 113), and challenges to its status have resulted in some 30 revisions to its constitution since its establishment in 1981.

Nevertheless, the promotion system in the Turkish higher education sector has a high degree of transparency compared to European countries. YÖK regulations require professorial vacancies to be advertised in one of the five highest circulation daily newspapers in Turkey (Özbilgin and Healy, 2004: 7). Candidates have to provide a portfolio including their CVs, details of their scientific publications, educational and training activities, supervision of research degrees, and overall contribution to their current institution. Three conditions are specified for promotion to full professorship: first, applicants should have served at least five years at associate professor grade in a discipline closely associated with the professorial post sought; second, they should have a portfolio of original research publications produced at an international level; and, third, they should be selected for a professorial post (TUBA, 2004;YÖK, 1998).

These regulations make no implicit or explicit reference to sex equality issues, such as direct or indirect discrimination in promotion or selection processes. Once candidates qualify through YÖK for a professorial chair, they must also be appointed to a chair by their local university in order for their title to be recognized. Each Turkish university, both state and private, has its own promotion system; some are reportedly tougher than the YÖK procedure, placing heavier emphasis on research output in the form of international publications (Özkanli and Korkmaz, 2000: 85). This creates a two-track employment system.

Nevertheless, Özbilgin and Healy (2004: 8) argue that this standardized system of recruitment is more open and, in principle, provides greater equality of access to full professorial posts than in many other countries, where such standardization is rare. The appointment of professors in Europe and the US often involves multiple systems; many of these are obscure, allow variable criteria for appointment, and often rely on internal labour markets. The most open systems rely on the requirement for similar attributes to those under the YÖK system. While many western academics assume that their professorial appointment systems are of an equal or superior academic level to those of other, particularly less developed, countries, such assumptions should be questioned particularly in debates on gender equity. The ETAN (2000: viii) report on mainstreaming gender equality in Europe stated that old-fashioned practices permeate employment and promotion procedures in many academic institutions: patronage, 'old boys' networks', and personal invitations to fill posts cut across 'fair and effective employment procedures'.

Despite the greater transparency in the Turkish system, it is important to recognize that competition for posts in particular universities and organizational politics militate against universally equitable outcomes ( Özbilgin and Healy, 2004: 8). In this, Turkey shares a common experience with western European and North American university systems.

The Lived Experiences of Turkish Professors

We now turn to qualitative evidence at the microlevel. While we acknowledge women's achievement in academic work in Turkey, it is important to remember that those who achieve hierarchical success are still relatively rare. To explore the perceptions of men and women professors, we focus on two key interrelated elements of their employment relationships: the home-work interface and structures of discrimination.

Home-Work Interface

There are both universal and nationally specific dimensions to our findings. Though Turkish women have attained professional careers for some eight decades, the traditional family ideology and gender division of labour, which assigned carer and domestic roles to women and breadwinner roles to men, remains the main social frame of reference [START_REF] Peker | Internal Migration and the Marginal Sector[END_REF]. Our study of senior academics reveals a near universal picture of gendered domestic roles and responsibilities. Women are responsible for managing the household; men 'help' rather than sharing domestic tasks. The 'normality' of this was indicated by an apparent lack of association between domestic responsibilities and career development. None of our male respondents mentioned family affairs as hindering their promotion (one stated that 'I'm involved in my own academic tasks usually, sometimes I help her with the housework'), but nor did female professors recognize structural barriers. They reported that they were largely content with (or perhaps resigned to) their dual roles, and often normalized the burden caused by domestic work by failing to question the role distribution.

The following statement by a female professor is typical: 'Actually family did not hinder me but when my children were younger I had difficulties in doing research, teaching, working and also taking care of the house'. Another explained this paradoxical situation: I believe that there is equality between the sexes. However, once you enter the academic profession, the difficulties they [women and men] face are different. However much men help, responsibilities of caring for the family and children are expected of women . . . It is very positive for a woman to have an academic career. It has high social status. It is not important if she earns less. However, if men earn less, they are victimized.

The paradox is complicated by the expectation that women will marry upward socially, and those who are highly qualified thus find a reduced pool of potential partners. Accordingly, some 41 percent of women academics are married to other academics (Özkanli and Korkmaz, 2000: 30). The established gender order in the home constrains such women's employment 'choices' [START_REF] Healy | Structuring Commitments in Interrupted Careers[END_REF]. Dual-career families in the study, and other female academics, often employed domestic help to redress the imbalance in the share of domestic work. A male professor explained that 'having assistance reduces my wife's domestic responsibilities. We have a commercial cleaning service. My wife is responsible for cooking'.

Female respondents recognized gendered structural constraints for men and suggested that 'financial responsibilities of being a man' and 'compulsory military service' are the main hindrances for men's career advancement in the sector. One male professor stated that barriers to career development exist only for men for these reasons, while other men saw marriage and childcare as important barriers to women's career development. Neither marriage nor childcare appeared to constitute a problem for male respondents.

Women respondents appreciated men's help and contribution to their career. 'My mother and father supported me both in material and spiritual ways until I lost them,' said one. 'Since I got married, my husband has been supporting me by being understanding about my work and exchanging ideas with me'. Only five of the 30 male professors acknowledged the support of their immediate families; another five cited support received from their colleagues. 3 As well as the support of their immediate families, female professors mentioned friends and colleagues. PhD supervisors were highlighted as important sources of support at both the academic and emotional level.

The role of significant others, particularly partners, is a recurring theme in the literature on women's achievement [START_REF] Healy | Different Careers -Equal Professionals: Women in Teaching[END_REF][START_REF] Ledwith | The Making of Trade Union Leaders[END_REF]. [START_REF] Deem | Gender, Organizational Cultures and the Practices of Manager-Academics in UK Universities[END_REF], in her study of women academics in the UK, found that most women raised gender issues ranging from inequitable household and motherhood responsibilities to sexist behaviour by some male colleagues and discrimination in promotion. The link with the male domestic contribution is important in moving to gender equality. As Esping-Andersen (2002: 124) argues, neither social nor labour market policies alone will produce such equality; he identifies the 'admittedly weak feminization of the male life cycle' as a barrier to equal career opportunities in the Nordic countries.

Structures of Gendered Discrimination

Women in Turkey face further structures of gendered discrimination, yet the perception of gendered disadvantage was not high among our respondents. When asked about barriers that they faced as academic workers, there was, however, a gendered variation. Many male professors claimed to have faced no disadvantages or barriers, but a few identified institutional constraints in the promotion procedures. While many female professors argued that they had not experienced personal barriers to their career development, some did identify barriers to their career advancement, such as lack of support from family and friends, undergoing a divorce, having a child with a disability, and administrative obstructions. In general, while men tended to perceive institutional constraints, women were more likely to perceive familial constraints. One female professor suggested that men have inherited advantages in social life which spill over into academic life: 'I think that women's success is not easily accepted by women and men . . . Men are performing their professional duties more independently compared to women. They are already conditioned to be successful in academic and social life'. Some male professors accepted that there is gender discrimination in working life, but not in academic life. The belief in the high prestige and reputation of the profession conceals some inequalities, implying a perceived superiority and lack of discrimination in the academic profession. As one commented, 'gender discrimination is not a significant issue here [in the university] and being men or women is beyond question in an academic institution'. The underpinning assumption is that the socially privileged position of academic workers in Turkey, particularly full professors, must give them some degree of immunity from discrimination: 'I do not believe in discrimination in this profession. Women face discrimination in lots of other sectors but not in the university system'. The issue of gender discrimination is almost invisible to male professors, who are mostly very certain that there is no sex discrimination in university or academic life. 'There are no barriers to women in Turkey in this area. I've never encountered it even in the most conservative places. Male colleagues also do support them [women]'.

The belief in the equitable ideal of employment recurs in other Turkish studies, for example of universities (Özkanli and Korkmaz, 2000: 65) and banking [START_REF] Özbilgin | Banking and Gender: Sex Equality in the Financial Services Sector in Britain and Turkey[END_REF]. This belief is, nevertheless, often accompanied by the view that women academics should work more than men in order to achieve career success. However, this view was not universally shared by women: as one respondent insisted, 'all the discriminatory factors that exist in social life prevail in academic life as well'. Mischau (2001: 25) has remarked that 'there is no university where the percentage of female professors corresponds with the percentage of female academic staff or students'. While Turkish women's progress in academia seems greater than their European counterparts, this success is not underpinned by a critical mass of women academics nor by widespread labour market activity by women. It is evident that strong historical and national forces have been the main incentive for educated women to contribute to the modernization of Turkey; whereas in Europe, the major impetus has come from legislation designed to combat the negative effects of discrimination.

Discussion and Conclusions

We have concentrated on Turkey, but we recognize that some of the characteristics identified for Turkey may be shared with other European countries, notable those in the CEE. What distinguishes Turkey is the contradiction between women's low labour market participation and their success in the professions, which seems counter-intuitive to the western eye. Most western commentators seek remedial measures for gendered discrimination in the strengthening of legislation. For Turkey, this class of women benefited not from legislation, but from a strong state ideology of equality. This 'state feminism' resulted from the rupture with the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Thus revolutionary change transformed the lives of middle-class women.

Academic women felt the impact of this transformation. At the institutional level, it was underpinned with the introduction of YÖK: the transparency of its employment policies has facilitated women's progress. This transparency is continually sought by feminists in universities in Europe and North America, but often with at best partial success. Nevertheless, to make an obvious point, for women to achieve hierarchical success in an occupation, they must take jobs from men or must benefit disproportionately from an increase in employment opportunities for both. Part of the cumulative explanation of women's success in Turkish academia could be the exodus of men from the profession, consistent with the interpretation by Reskin and Roos (1990) of the feminization of some North American occupations. Given Turkey's comparatively low level of academic pay and the associated view that academic work is no longer attractive for men, this argument might seem persuasive. However, Eurostat data do not support this interpretation: academic salaries in Turkey, in terms of purchasing power, are not lower than those in countries with a far lower proportion of women academics. It is the expansion of the university sector that has provided new opportunities for both women and men.

Nevertheless, Turkish women face severe career constraints. A strong family ideology continues to result in the underemployment of women with tertiary education. At the same time, the family can have contradictory functions: our study demonstrates its importance in enabling and facilitating women to develop their academic careers. The women professors also demonstrated that they used the degrees of freedom available to develop their careers and allow their 'choices' to become a reality. Their constrained agency was accepted within the societal context, and it appeared that the support they received was conditional on respecting the bounds of the family ideology.

Esping-Andersen (2002) argues that there exists a broad consensus on what constitutes women-friendly policy. It includes affordable day care, paid maternity and parental leave, a right to leave when children are ill, and the ability to match work with school hours. But he adds that this is not sufficient: there is a need to change both gendered choices and societal constraints, including an inducement to men to embrace a more 'feminine' life cycle. Unlike Turkey (and also many CEE countries), Denmark has some of the best 'packages' of equality benefits, and its female employment rate nearly matches that of men's; yet women's share of academic employment, in particular at professorial level, is well below the European average.

The continued hierarchical achievement of women in Turkish academia is under threat at different levels. There is a weakening of the dominant state ideology; greater liberalization in higher education may lead to more 'flexibility' and less transparency. Our study indicates the importance of family; however, balancing work and family roles is also contingent on financial resources to support help with household and childcare tasks. Family is both a constraint and an enabler; in this there are both commonalities as well as national particularities across Europe.

Our study of Turkey is important in the context of the 'New Europe', since it demonstrates the importance of state ideology in promoting gender equality. The explanation of Turkish women's academic success is multilayered and lies in the cumulative and interrelated effect of state policy, institutional transparency, increased labour demand, the home-work interface, and the agency of the professors themselves. This example is, nevertheless, not typical of Turkish women's labour market experience, and it should be emphasized that this article draws on the experience of a highly educated and privileged elite. This does not negate the importance of their experience; after all, it is such women who are at the centre of debates on vertical segregation in the countries of Europe. The Turkish example suggests that the legislatively focused European approach to equality, which Turkey is now adopting as part of its candidacy for EU membership, is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve gender equality. NOTES 1 See, for example, in the United Kingdom, [START_REF] Bett | Independent Review of Higher Education Pay and Conditions: Report of a Committee Chaired by Sir Michael Bett[END_REF], [START_REF] Ledwith | Balancing Gender in Higher Education: A Study of the Experience of Senior Women in a "New" UK University[END_REF], [START_REF] Farish | Equal Opportunities in Colleges and Universities[END_REF][START_REF] Heward | Women at the Top in Higher Education: Equal Opportunities Policies in Action?[END_REF][START_REF] Heward | Women at the Top in Higher Education: Equal Opportunities Policies in Action?[END_REF]; in Europe more generally, David and [START_REF] Woodward | Ingiltere ve Türkiye'de Firsat Es ¸itlig ˘i[END_REF]; in the Middle East, [START_REF] Arabsheibani | Higher Education and Occupational Status of Women in Egypt[END_REF] and [START_REF] Toren | The Effects of Minority Size on Women's Position in Academia[END_REF]; in Australia, [START_REF] Shoemark | Equal Opportunity Units: Change Agencies[END_REF] and [START_REF] Burton | The Role of Equity Units in the Public Sector and in Universities[END_REF]; and in North America, [START_REF] Konrad | Understanding the Hiring of Women and Minorities in Educational Institutions[END_REF].

  FIGURE 1. Women's Economic Activity Rates as a Percentage of Men's in Europe

  also shows that in the EU-25, women are far more ource: Data collated from Women in Science (WiS) 2005

FIGURE 2 .

 2 FIGURE 2. Percentage of women academics and professors in Europe(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)

European Journal of Industrial Relations 11(2)

Article 10 of the Turkish Constitution specifies that all individuals are equal, irrespective of language, race, colour, sex and political opinion.

In the UK,[START_REF] Deem | Gender, Organizational Cultures and the Practices of Manager-Academics in UK Universities[END_REF] identified the reluctance of men to ascribe how gender might have affected their careers (though many pointed to support structures given by a non-working partner).