Islam and Support for Gender Inequality 
among Women in Turkey: Comparing
Attitudes across Institutional Contexts

John P. Bartkowski, Gabriel A. Acevedo,
Gulcimen Karakeci, and Favor Campbell

Abstract

Turkey has been characterized as a nation that exhibits an amal-
gam of Eastern and Western cultural values. For a long time, Turkey 
had prohibited Muslim women’s wearing of the veil in many pub-
lic venues. Yet, the vast majority of this nation’s citizens are highly 
devout Muslims. Our study uses these paradoxes as a springboard 
for investigating early twenty-first-century religious influences 
on Turkish Muslim women’s attitudes toward gender inequality. 
We introduce the theoretical construct of diversified institutional 
contexts, arguing that gender is not simply a singular institutional 
form but rather ebbs and flows with women’s mobility across var-
iegated institutional settings. We hypothesize that religious devo-
tion among Muslim women in Turkey circa the year 2000 will be 
associated with greater support for gender inequality across several 
institutional domains, namely, family, education, the workplace, 
and politics. In addition, we anticipate that as women move across 

Dr. John P. Bartkowski (Ph.D., Sociology, University of Texas-Austin, 1997) is Pro-
fessor of Sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Much of 
his research focuses on religion, gender, and civil society. His latest book is The 
Arc of Faith-Based Initiatives: Religion’s Changing Role in Welfare Service Provision 
(Springer 2018). Dr. Gabriel Acevedo (Ph.D., Sociology, Yale University, 2005) is 
a Data Analytics Consultant specializing in human service evaluation and man-
agement. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Social 
Sciences at St. Mary's University, San Antonio, Texas. Gulcimen Karakeci (M.S., 
Sociology, UTSA) is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the Uni-
versity of Essex, UK. Favor Campbell (M.S., Sociology, UTSA) is a lecturer in the 
Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio.