Why Turkish women are no ladies

The scene is the conference hall of the İzmir Bar Association. The occasion is the 82nd anniversary of Turkish women's suffrage. As Turks never get tired of telling you, in voices that drop an octave in admiration of a glorious/glorified past, Turkish women obtained the right to vote and be elected before some of their European sisters, thanks to the nation's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Fortunately, the panel organized by the bar's leading figure on women's legal rights, Nuriye Kadan, did not focus on the past, but instead focused on the gloomy present. Titled "From the Right to Vote, to Exclusion," the subject was the low participation rate of women in politics, business life and academia. But it does not take long for it to turn into a debate on semantics.

A male professor, one of those jovial academic types, touched raw nerves when he deviated from his written text and made spontaneous statements on women in academia. "There are many ladies among our colleagues. In certain departments, our lady colleagues outnumber us and they do well," the professor said. 

The audience (mainly young, female lawyers) stirred uneasily and after murmurs, several voiced: "'Woman' [kadın] professor. We want to be referred to as women, not ladies [bayan/hanım]." They received a round of applause. 

A quick note to non-Turkish speaking readers: In Turkish, "hanım" or "bayan" (translated as lady or ma'm) is a form of address for women, whereas "kadın" (woman) is the gender. Yet the simple issue of semantics has been a hot debate in life and print, with more and more people, some out of ignorance but others out of an ideological outlook, using "hanım" instead of "kadın."

The professor looked around the hall surprised, slightly hurt at the female...