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This article is an extended introduction to The Istanbul Memo. To access the full dataset and explore more data-driven insights on Türkiye and beyond, subscribe to our newsletter.
Anyone who spent their childhood or teenage years in Türkiye in the 2000s will remember the campaigns that seemed to be everywhere. Between prime time talk shows and evening news bulletins, advertisements urged families to keep their daughters in school.
Business groups, media organizations and civil society initiatives joined the effort. Campaigns such as "Baba Beni Okula Gonder," (Dad, Send Me to School) became part of the national conversation, particularly over eastern and southeastern provinces where girls' school enrollment lagged behind the rest of the country.
At the time, the ambition was not university education and the challenge was much more basic. The priority was ensuring that girls completed primary and secondary school and remained in the education system long enough to reach graduation as part of compulsory education.
Two decades later, it is possible to measure how far that effort has come. This week's data points to one of the most significant social transformations in modern Türkiye.
More than half of Turkish women aged 25-34 now hold a higher education degree. In 2008, only one in eight did. The increase has been so rapid that women, who once trailed men in university attainment, now comfortably surpass them.
The story is not simply about more university seats or more campuses, as those developments benefited indiscriminately. What makes Türkiye's experience remarkable is the speed at which young women moved from educational disadvantage to becoming the driving force behind the country's rising level of higher education attainment.
A generation ago, the debate was whether girls would stay in school. Today, the question is how a generation of highly educated women is reshaping the country's workforce, family life and social expectations. As the public conversation around the topic also evolves, studying at the higher education level is now more of a women's endeavor than a men's in Türkiye, and the statistics back it up.
To be sure, this is not a uniquely Turkish phenomenon. Across much of the developed world, women have outpaced men in higher education for decades. In the United States, women accounted for 58% of all college students in 2020, up from 56% just six years earlier. The gap has only widened steadily over time: while roughly 200,000 more women than men were enrolled in college in 1979, that difference exceeded 3 million by 2021.
The broader OECD picture tells a similar story. In nearly every member country, young women are more likely than young men to hold a university degree. On average, women in the 25-34 age group enjoy a 13-point advantage over men. The idea of women overtaking men in higher education has been a norm across the developed world and in many countries since long.
Türkiye's distinctive feature is not that it joined this trend, but how quickly it did so. For much of the 2000s, the country sat near the bottom of the OECD rankings for young female university graduates. Today, it has overtaken several European peers like Germany, Italy or Finland and recorded one of the fastest increases in the developed world.
Yet the story is not one of arrival. Despite this remarkable progress, both Turkish women and men still remain below the OECD average in higher education attainment. The gap with the world's leaders is substantial.
In countries such as South Korea, Canada and Japan, more than 70% of women aged 25-34 hold a university degree. Türkiye has examples of Spain, the Netherlands, or Sweden to reach in Europe as well. Türkiye's achievement, then, is less about reaching the finish line than about the speed of the catch-up.
The country has moved from discussing whether girls should stay in school to debating the social consequences of having one of the fastest-rising cohorts of educated women in the OECD. In other words, what makes the story noteworthy is that Türkiye, once one of the laggards in this trend, has not only caught up but done so with remarkable speed.
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