Turkey's 70-year-long democracy has been interrupted by several coup d'états, among which the 1980 coup was the most traumatic in terms of its long-term consequences and penetration into society.

One of the primary outcomes of the 1980 military coup was the putschists' desire to eliminate any inkling of political heterogeneity within Turkish society. The evidence suggests that in this objective the coup was successful. After only a decade, the relative relaxation of these effects through civilian governments, greater urbanization, increasing prosperity and population growth allowed society to transform to some extent when we reached the 1990s.

One obvious manifestation of this transformation was the considerable public support garnered by political parties established by overtly religious people. By the middle of the decade, these parties had started to win municipal elections and develop into genuine alternatives to the government. Meanwhile, a parallel development was also seen among civil society groups, who began to grow and interact with each other.

And then came the infamous Feb. 28 declaration of 1997. The military, with the wholesale support of the secularist establishment, mobilized the state's power to disenfranchise the slowly emerging religious and conservative identity. It also aimed to stop any social mobility from among the middle and lower classes.

The headscarf ban, which covered hospitals, schools and every other state institution, soon moved to the public arena through a campaign of intimidation and misrepresentation. Policies included bans on headscarves and beards, persecution of those who prayed, the stalking of religious people before discrediting the values they stand for, and organized attacks on religious groups and sects. The media was exploited to portray even the simple act of prayer as a reactionary crime.

Businesses owned by people with overt religious identity felt great pressure. Even public schools didn't escape from this systematic lynching. Imam-hatip school where conservatives sent their children to study a religion-weighted curriculum were specifically targeted. By introducing a coefficient system that everyone knew targeted imam-hatip graduates, policy-makers tried to ensure that successful students from rural and more conservative sections of society wouldn't get the chance to enter the prestigious universities of metropolitan cities.The Feb. 28 declaration, which was later called "the post-modern coup," aimed at nothing less than the social engineering of Turkey and its influence was felt everywhere, from the private sector to the bureaucracy, from the military to the civil associations.

Anyone suspected of holding any religious sympathies could be purged.The coefficient problem, the headscarf ban and these pressures from the state hierarchy are now history.President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's efforts and determination have ensured that each and every Feb. 28 measure that violated the rights and freedoms of the Turkish people were annulled during 15 years AK Party rule.However, there are certain aspects of the Feb. 28 measures that continue to reverberate today.

Successful students who failed to get into the universities they deserved to due to the coefficient measure are still suffering from the effects of their victimization. They will be disadvantaged for the rest of their days. So will those women who refused to remove their headscarves. They were forced to choose between their beliefs and their education. Refusing to bend to the establishment's will, they sacrificed their future. Nowadays, most are seen not as heroes of democracy and the freedom of belief, but as housewives with a high-school diploma. If anyone deserves affirmative action, it is these women.

Many public servants who were fired because of their headscarves have not been given their due compensation. Even if some have returned to their jobs, no one cares about decades of lost wages and missed promotions. Some people who were tried and found guilty on vague charges of being reactionary in the post-Feb. 28 fervor are still in jail. These inmates have been in jail for decades for actions that would have no criminal consequences today.

The trials of those responsible for the Feb. 28 coup plot are largely symbolic and proceed at a glacial pace.

Those who returned to school after the lifting of the headscarf ban will never be able to offset the 10 or 15 years they have lost. After graduation, they need to compete with applicants who are much younger. It is unfair that these people are forced to enter recruitment tests with people who have fresher minds. Even if they are able to compete, they come up against ageism.

The significant losses suffered by businessmen to their wealth and reputations in the Feb. 28 coup era are ignored. Almost no one knows that these people were blacklisted as "green capital" and their homes and businesses were raided repeatedly.

Not a single apology has been issued to those women with headscarves who were belittled and discriminated against at public offices and especially in universities, manhandled at university gates and insulted by their teachers and classmates. No one who was systematically forced to remove her religious garb at the school or office gates heard a single voice of regret from those responsible for the great emotional and psychological scars they caused.

The discrimination against and demeaning of women with headscarves largely continues in this day and age. Despite so many professionally educated young women, there is not a single executive wearing a headscarf at the great plaza buildings, in the finance sector, at the huge banks or international conglomerates. Many don't even have a single white-collar employee with a headscarf.There are few businesses and sectors where women with headscarves can find themselves a space to advance. Veiled women can only find a place at the government and presidential offices, with the backing and determination of President Erdoğan to eliminate the problem once and for all. We have a woman minister with a headscarf, a chief advisor to the president and MPs, but not a single CEO in the private sector.

You may find many women journalists, columnists and managers in the mainstream pro-government media wearing a headscarf, but not a single one in anti-government media, or big newspapers and TV channels like CNNTurk or Hürriyet Daily. There are none in the main opposition party CHP, which keeps complaining about polarization in Turkey, yet in keeping with its ultra-secular homogeneous ideology, excludes the majority of women in Turkey. This is the most anti-feminist stance that a society can face in terms of exclusion.

To be honest, if it wasn't for President Erdoğan's determination and will, many male members of the AK Party would not be paying too much attention to this issue, even though their wives and daughters suffered immensely from the same Feb 28 measures. The issue of the public visibility of women is of secondary importance for most of them.

Exclusion of women wearing the headscarf from the public sphere, business sectors and from decision-making mechanisms means the exclusion of some 68 percent of the female population of the country. This is also a violation of women's empowerment in society.

Still, we live in an age where even conservative men, as well as the secular society, are uncomfortable seeing women with headscarves as colleagues. They see these women as weak targets who do not deserve their status and are annoyed when they see them at the forefront. This is exactly why veiled women are almost exclusively at senior posts in government circles and in pro-government media companies.

However, when we try to explain to our western colleagues this truth, we are confronted with a skewed understanding that portrays Erdoğan as "the enemy of women" and the secular society as "pro-feminine." This cannot be further from the truth. The secular society in Turkey is anti-feminine, discriminatory and only cares about the exterior appearance of women, failing to respect them as equals.