TURKEY’s authoritarian ruler President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed it was impossible to discriminate against women today as he slammed Western notions of gender equality at the third international Women and Justice Summit in Istanbul.

Organised by the Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Service along with the Women and Democracy Association (KADEM) where Sumeyye Erdogan Bayraktar is deputy chair, the summit had “family empowerment” as its main theme.

Mr Erdogan used his opening speech to criticise the Western approach to equality saying: “It is not surprising that the mentality which used woman as a commodity of the lowest kind yesterday, uses woman today in the package of equality by treating her as a commodity again.”

He claimed that discrimination against women was not possible in Turkey “because the nature and creation require that we look at all of the created with the same eyes. There is no gender-based discrimination in our culture or roots.”

Mr Erdogan suggested that if men and women were truly equal they should be able to run the 100 metres together.

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader has made a series of controversial remarks in recent years, often timed ahead of International Women’s Day and International Day for the Eradication of Violence Against Women.

In 2016 he drew the ire of women’s organisations in Turkey when he claimed that women should give birth to at least three children, branding childless women as “deficient and incomplete.”

“Rejecting motherhood means giving up on humanity,” he said at the ceremony for the official opening of the KADEM building. 

Despite Mr Erdogan’s claims, Turkey remains one of the world’s most unequal societies in terms of gender equality. It ranks 120th of 136 nations in the World Economic Forum’s 2013 Gender Gap Index.

Violence against women is on the rise with at least 329 women killed in the first 10-months of 2018 with 870 women abused in the first eight months of the year and 342 raped over the same period.

Women are hit disproportionately by Turkey’s deepening economic crisis with unemployment rates of 14.6 per cent rising to 25.6 per cent of young women.

92 per cent of women are employed in workplaces without a trade union and are paid 17.8 per cent less than men.