Sevil Sümer from the University of Bergen stated this when she recently defended her thesis for a doctorate in Sociology. She has studied the dynamics of family and gender practice in the Norwegian and the Turkish urban culture.
11 Norwegian and 16 Turkish couples were questioned about family and gender matters, sharing housework and child-care, work outside the home, and their relationship to the state. Sümer found similarities between Norway and Turkey as far as child-care and housework is concerned.
- It is still the women who feel most responsibility for and actually do more care- and household work, Sümer says.
Another similarity between the two countries is that it the women who most frequently reduce their working hours outside the home when work-demands and family-demands collide. Sümer thinks that there is not necessarily anything wrong with that as long as this is a real choice. She points out that it is a real choice when the woman has a supporting network around her with a partner who helps out with the children and the house, friends and family living nearby, and certainly public institutions offering day-care for a reasonable price.
- My vision of a good society is where the problems of families with young children are spoken of as "a public matter" not "a private problem", says Sümer.
The Norwegian welfare state, and thereby finances, are the most important factor separating Norwegian and Turkish family life on the practical level. Turkish society is dominated by the free market, and the Turkish state does not have an economic base which can finance gender equality. On the contrary, the latest economic crisis has resulted in even more women leaving the work force.
But in her doctoral thesis Sevil Sümer emphasises that the difference between paid and unpaid work is still strongly gendered in Norway. Norway until the 1990's was less developed than other Scandinavian countries concerning women's possibilities to combine being a mother with another job.
- In Norway the state is considered friendly by the ones being asked, and it is important to note that the state has changed the role of fathers, among other things by granting fathers paternity leave. The Turkish couples regarded the state as more of a hindrance for gender equality, and they had no expectations toward it, Sümer answered under her thesis defence.
This is, not unexpectedly, only one of several differences between the countries. But what was surprising was the Norwegian and Turkish couples' definitions of the concept of 'family'. The Norwegian couples used a more relaxed definition of 'family' than the Turkish did. Relatives are included in the Norwegian definition which was based on who they invited to holiday reunions. The Turks defined 'family' in a narrower sense, including only those persons who one earned money to support.
Sümer advanced the aspect of time as one of the most important findings in her study. Norwegian couples, to a much greater extent than the Turkish, feel that time for the family, for oneself and sometimes for the job is too sparse. Individualism is therefore something which one believes has a strong standing in Norway, while in reality so much time is spent with children and one's partner that the individualistic fades into the background.
The external examiners professor David Morgan and professor Zehra F. Arat stressed that a very interesting and stimulating work had been done, and that it was especially exciting to have compared two cultures. Sümer's thesis Global Issues / Local Troubles: A Comparative Study of Turkish and Norwegian Urban Dual-Earner Families was said to touch the heart of Sociology since the thesis connects the global with the local and in addition invites us into people's homes.