Laws promoting gender equality often fail to improve women’s experiences. This failure is particularly acute for the experiences of socio-economically marginalized women. Understanding why legislated equality as prescribed in laws often does not lead to the equality of outcomes is an ongoing puzzle in the studies of gender and politics. Utilizing an intersectional approach, this paper argues that education can serve as a constitutive element for marginalized women to enable legislated equality as prescribed in laws to lead to real equality, the equality of outcomes. This article empirically investigates the influence of education by utilizing a unique dataset compiled by an internationally recognized NGO, Kamer, on a representative data of the marginalized women in the eastern city of Diyarbakır in Turkey. The study indicates that a higher level of education is significantly and positively associated with the likelihood of claiming to obtain equal inheritance. Therefore, mere legislation of genderprogressive laws is not sufficient to improve the experiences of women, and achieving gender equality may require improving the educational status of women. The current study also outlines the gains from intersectional research in studying marginalized women’s experiences and advocates for the employment of an intersectional approach in more empirical studies.

Introduction

Recent decades have witnessed the legislation of gender progressive property laws across the world (Agarwal, 1994; Deere & De Leal, 2014). However, these laws failed to significantly alter the resources allocated to women and to even protect their newly ascribed rights. The recent estimates indicate that only 1 to 2% of titled land worldwide belongs to women (Cherif, 2015). Land reforms in developing countries such as India, Columbia, Bolivia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Mexico, which were specifically aimed at improving women’s property rights, failed to fulfill the goals of empowerment (Agarwal, 1994; Deere & León, 2003; Deere & De Leal, 2014; LeBeau et al., 2004; Reproductive Rights, 1997). Inheritance constitutes one of the major venues through which women own wealth (Deere & León, 2003). Inheritance laws constitute a dimension of women’s property rights that derive from family laws. Htun and Weldon (2015) define family law as “legal norms governing the formation and internal relations of … social units (p:454) (Htun & Weldon, 2015)”. Progressive family laws can improve the realities of women’s experiences if they are accompanied by mechanisms that can enforce these laws (Htun & Weldon, 2010). These mechanisms can derive from both state structures and women’s socio-economic determinants that make it easier for them to benefit from gender-egalitarian laws. In many cases the egalitarian legislations on family laws failed to produce the expected egalitarian outcomes, indicative of the insufficiency of the mechanisms. In Turkey, despite the fact that courts have mandated equal inheritance rights between men and women since 1926, only 20% of women own some form of property and 92% of property is owned by men, as women have rescinded their inheritance rights to their male relatives (O’Neil & Toktas, 2017; Toktas, O’neil, et al., 2013). Overall, the gender-progressive reforms led to a bifurcation between the legislated equality as the equality of rights prescribed in laws, and real equality as the equality of outcomes (Deere & De Leal, 2014). The bifurcation between legislated equality and the equality of outcomes can be even more acute among marginalized women, who often face additional barriers in protecting their rights. Can education of marginalized women function as a mechanism that can enable them to benefit from the legislated equality? This article attempts to answer this question through employing an intersectional approach on the constitutive factors of women’s socio-economic conditions. For this purpose, this article utilizes an original and representative dataset of the socio-economic and inheritance status data regarding 1314 marginalized women in the eastern city of Diyarbakır in Turkey. To my knowledge this is the first study to employ an intersectional approach to understand the role of education in enabling women to benefit from the legislated equality among the marginalized women. In addition, to my knowledge this is also the first study that provides evidence on the linkage between education and women’s ability to benefit from the legislated equality on a representative dataset. The results show that more educated women are more likely to report equal inheritance provision, a clause specified in the Civic Court in Turkey. This study is structured as follows: in the next section I present the theoretical explanations for the relationship between women’s education and their inheritance rights. In the third section I propose the theoretical framework on intersectionality as it relates to underprivileged women’s relationship with gender-progressive laws. In the fourth section I present the inheritance distribution scheme in the Turkish context. In the fifth section I present my research design. The sixth section provides a statistical analysis.