A couple of days ago, Vodafone Turkey, one of Turkey’s cellular carriers, brought Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of the world’s most popular social networking service, Facebook, to Istanbul to give a speech at a special gathering of CEOs.

Sandberg shared some of the messages from her international best-seller Lean In, which recently came out in Turkish. According to Sandberg, girls should be more represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics; women themselves should be offering more support to each other and rather than being judged or condemned, girls’ leadership skills and aspirations should be nurtured from very early on.

At the same meeting, Hanzade Dogan Boyner, founder of the biggest online retailer in the region and the president of Dogan Online, addressed the audience and agreed with Sandberg’s views that a lack of women’s self-determination represents the main problem. Despite low levels of women’s participation in the Turkish workforce, Boyner mentioned interesting statistics, including a 12% percentage of women CEOs in Turkey, much higher than in many Western countries. While reflecting on past studies and programs like “Father, send me to school” for educating young girls in Turkey, Boyner admitted disappointment that achieving more equality between the sexes in education did not result in increased women’s participation in the workforce. Moreover, despite defending system changes like increased maternity leave, child care services at work or breast-feeding rooms, representation of women at the top level has remained unchanged. Thus, she concluded, the main problem is not the system, but women themselves, who must change their own thinking and determination, while it is necessary to start changing perceptions from a very early age so girls don’t internalize inequality while growing up.

Speaking of women’s perceptions as a factor in their career success, yenibiris.com (“a new job” in Turkish) recently conducted a survey of 1,392 Turkish working women with five or more years of experience. The results showed that 49.4% of participants see being a woman as a disadvantage for a career, 35.4% see it as neither advantage nor disadvantage while 15.2% see being a woman as an advantage.