http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/world/europe/turkish-president-says-women-shouldnt-be-considered-equals.html 2014-11-25 04:59:16 Turkish President Says Women Shouldn’t Be Considered Equals At an international conference on justice and rights, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday said that women should not be regarded as equal to men and condemned feminists for rejecting motherhood. === ISTANBUL — President Mr. Erdogan also condemned feminists for rejecting motherhood.  “You cannot put women and men on an equal footing,” Mr. Erdogan said in an address to the conference here, according to the semiofficial Anadolu news agency. “It is against her nature — because her nature is different, her bodily constitution is different.” The president, a Muslim who as prime minister until recently led the Islamic-inspired Justice and Development Party that controls the government, said that pregnancy and motherhood were sacred in Islam. Some forms of work, he cautioned, are unsuitable for women. “You cannot make women work in every job that a man works at, as in Communist regimes,” he said. “Give her a shovel and make her work — this cannot be. It would primarily be against her delicate nature.” Women’s rights activists stormed social media networks with furious responses to the address. “The Constitution, international agreements have all been crushed,” Fatma Aytac, a member of KA-DER, a women’s group, posted on Twitter.  Ozlem Dalkiran, a human rights activist and advocate for gender equality in “What he misses, though, is that the women’s rights movement in Turkey is a very strong one, and his provocative statements are making us even stronger.” Turkey ranked 125th out of 142 countries in an assessment of gender equality in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2014. In his speech on Monday, Mr. Erdogan asserted that justice rather than equality was what women needed. His remarks reportedly received loud applause from members of the Women and Democracy Association, a conservative nongovernmental organization that sponsored the conference and whose board includes Sumeyye Erdogan, one of his daughters.  As prime minister, a post he held until being All of those positions provoked an uproar among the country’s staunchly secular liberals. The president’s remarks on Monday came a week after he claimed that the Americas were discovered by Muslims at least 300 years before Columbus.