The position of women professionals in contemporary Turkey can be traced back to the early years of the Republic (founded in 1923), which instituted a series of social, political, linguistic, and economic reforms, centered on values of secularism, nationalism, and modernism, and tried to incorporate Westernization into society. The Kemalist principles of the new state assigned an important part to women in the modernization project and women's progress was interpreted as a significant measure of success in reaching modernity (Arat 1999).

One main dimension of the modernizati…