“Somebody Else's Discrimination”: (Un)Making Gender Discrimination in Research and Development in Turkey

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This study examines discourses of gender discrimination in Turkey's business enterprise sector of research and development (R&D), where women comprise only 27% of the workforce. Drawing on 308 surveys and 52 in‐depth interviews with professionals across three major R&D centers and a university technopark, it analyzes the discursive formations of gender discrimination in workplaces. Despite characterizing their jobs as gender neutral, men and women employed in R&D deploy discourses of bodily difference and women's “choices” to explain and normalize various forms of gender segregation, channeling women into “feminine” tasks and away from technical domains and leadership trajectories. When acknowledged, discrimination is either framed narrowly as formal discrimination or displaced onto other entities—different sectors, histories, or individuals—thereby complicating the prospects for self‐reflection and the implementation of equality initiatives. Women navigate this discursive constellation through various strategies, including the constant demonstration of technical competence and alignment with “feminine” professional spaces. These findings contribute to scholarship on gender and work by showing how gender discrimination is simultaneously rendered invisible, inevitable, trivial, or even necessary within knowledge economies, while being contested by women who actively strategize and bargain, albeit within the constraints of masculine networks.