When it passed a series of laws on gender equality in the 1920s and 1930s, giving women among other things the right to vote, Turkey was far ahead of its time. Many women in Western countries wondered then why they were worth less than women in Turkey.
Almost a century ago, the Republic of Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk embarked on a radical project of secularisation and westernisation which freed women from Islamic law and placed them in the centre of social life. Polygamy was banned and women were granted the right to divorce, to custody, to education and to inheritance. Women were freed from the harem and allowed into the ballrooms where they could dance with men in public. Atatürk even set an example of integration within his own family : one of his adopted daughters, Sabiha Gökçen, became the world’s first female fighter pilot in 1937. Five decades later, in 1983, Turkey legalised abortion, once again ahead of many Western democracies.
Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of Turkey in the West or the idealised vision of the Ottoman Empire evoked by today’s conservative and religious factions in Turkey, the groundwork for women’s liberation was laid in the Ottoman Empire a century earlier with a series of surprising reforms to inheritance and education law.
In keeping with that tradition, Turkey hosted the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention in 2011 and became the first out of a total of 45 mostly European countries to sign the first binding agreement against violence against women and domestic violence, regardless of sexual orientation (safeguards for LGBTI people are included in the Convention), based on prevention, protection, taxation and integrated policies. Ankara ratified the Convention and passed its own corresponding Law 6284 in 2012.
Turkey has made significant strides in women’s rights over the past century, from gaining voting rights in the 1930s to electing its first female prime minister in the 1990s. However, gender inequality and violence against women remain major issues in the country. This article will examine the status of women in Turkey, the progress made, and the obstacles that still need to be overcome.
A Brief History of Women’s Rights in Turkey
Turkey has a complex history when it comes to women’s rights. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the region before the founding of modern Turkey, had Islamic laws and practices that restricted women’s public roles. However, the Ottomans also had powerful female figures, like the women of the harem who influenced politics behind the scenes.
Major progress came with the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk He initiated a series of legal reforms to modernize Turkey based on secular Western models Some key milestones
- 1930: Turkish women gained the right to vote and run for local office.
- 1934: Women were granted full universal suffrage.
- 1935: Turkey adopted a new Civil Code based on the Swiss model, banning polygamy, granting women equal inheritance and divorce rights.
These reforms pioneered women’s emancipation in the Muslim world. However, critics argue they were imposed in a top-down manner without necessarily transforming societal attitudes.
The Legal Status of Women in Turkey Today
On paper, Turkish women enjoy equal rights and legal protections:
- Article 10 of the Constitution prohibits gender-based discrimination.
- Women can serve in the military, police, and parliament.
- Marital rape was criminalized in 2005.
- Workplace sexual harassment is banned under the Labor Law.
However, laws are not always effectively implemented or enforced. Discrimination persists in practice, especially when it comes to matters like equal pay, job promotions, and access to education.
Much also depends on a woman’s socioeconomic background. Women from wealthier urban backgrounds tend to have more opportunities than poor, rural women.
The Reality of Gender Inequality
Despite legal rights, Turkish women still face many challenges in society:
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Patriarchal norms: Ideas of male dominance and female obedience run deep, even among the urban middle class. Concepts of family honor put limits on women’s autonomy.
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Low workforce participation: Only around 35% of Turkish women work outside the home, the lowest rate in the OECD. Reasons include difficulty balancing work/family duties, and conservative norms that see childcare as solely a woman’s job.
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Political underrepresentation: Just 17% of Turkey’s parliamentarians are female, far below the OECD average of 30%. Quotas have been proposed to boost women’s political participation but not implemented.
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Domestic violence: According to government surveys, 40% of Turkish women have experienced physical or sexual violence from a husband or partner. Over 400 women were killed in domestic violence incidents in 2021.
While Turkey has progressive laws on paper, traditional mindsets, weak enforcement, and inadequate political will prevent true equality for women in day-to-day life. Government policies also tend to promote traditional family roles for women instead of full participation in education, the economy, and politics.
The Plight of Rural Women
Women in Turkey’s rural areas face additional disadvantages:
- High rates of illiteracy and lack of education for girls
- Heavy domestic burdens due to lack of infrastructure and technology
- Limited mobility and isolation within villages
- Widespread practices like child marriage and bride price (başlık parası)
- Vulnerability to violence with little legal recourse
Conservative traditions and tribal customs hold the most sway in remote villages, restricting women’s rights. Rural women have little independent access to courts, the police, shelters, or other institutions that could help increase their autonomy and safety.
Domestic violence is even less likely to be reported or prosecuted in rural areas. From 2002-2009, the majority of Turkey’s honor killing cases occurred in the eastern and southeastern countryside.
Signs of Progress
While serious problems remain, Turkish women’s lives have improved in many respects:
- More girls are getting educated. The gender gap in secondary education has disappeared, even if inequality persists at higher levels.
- More women are entering the workforce and professional fields. 27% of engineers, 43% of judges and lawyers, and 52% of university faculty are female.
- Reproductive rights have expanded. The use of contraception is rising, while maternal mortality is falling.
- Activism is making a difference. Groups like We Will Stop Femicide Platform track violence and lobby for better policies. Change may be slow but awareness is rising.
Many Turkish women live modern, secular lifestyles in the major cities, with career ambitions equal to men. But progress remains uneven across regions, classes, and ethnic/religious backgrounds. Eliminating systemic biases will be crucial for giving all Turkish women full autonomy and safety.
What Needs to Improve for Turkish Women
For Turkish women to achieve substantive equality, major changes are still required at multiple levels of society:
Government & Institutions
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Stronger enforcement of laws prohibiting domestic violence, workplace discrimination, etc.
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More female politicians and judges to represent women’s perspectives
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Better data collection on gender inequality issues
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Awareness campaigns and trainings for civil servants on women’s rights
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Improved social services like shelters, hotlines, and counselling for abuse victims
Education & Media
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Curriculum reforms to remove gender stereotypes from textbooks
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Teacher trainings to promote equality in classrooms
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Media campaigns and soap operas promoting progressive gender roles
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Zero tolerance for sexism or harassment at universities
Society & Culture
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Challenging patriarchal and honor-based values that restrict women
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Increasing male engagement in household duties and childcare
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Supporting girls’ education, especially in rural areas
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Ending practices like child marriage and bride price
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Encouraging female entrepreneurship and economic participation
Achieving gender equality requires top-down legal change as well as bottom-up cultural change. While Turkey has come a long way, it still has a long path ahead before all Turkish women enjoy their full rights in practice. Many activists remain optimistic that progress will continue in coming decades if ordinary citizens and policymakers work collaboratively for positive change.
An increase in gender-based violence
The deterioration of women’s rights has become increasingly evident. “Especially over the last 15 years. For decades women have struggled and have ultimately been able to gain rights such as voting, the right to stand for elections [passive suffrage], education, property and work. But women are now once again being forced back into the private sphere,” says Nuray Karaoğlu, president of KA.DER.
Her organisation supports female candidates seeking political office. The name kader, which means ‘destiny’ in Turkish, was deliberately chosen by the women of the group who wish to write their own destiny. KA.DER recently conducted a street survey beginning with the question “What is feminism ?” The answers they received ranged from ignorant to derisive : “misogyny,” “spinsters who ask for rights because they can’t take care of themselves,” “the rights being demanded by strange women who live with cats.”
Feminist organisations fear that withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention will also place law 6284 in jeopardy and they predict a continued increase in violence against women. According to Öz, the consequences started becoming clear immediately following withdrawal from the treaty, with some police stations and courts rejecting complaints from women who had suffered gender-based violence.
Indications that the law may eventually be repealed came in March, when Turkey’s Council of Judges and Prosecutors decided that restraining orders under Law 6284 must be assessed in a way that does not endanger the perpetrator’s health, leaving battered women unprotected in the midst of a pandemic in clear violation of the aforementioned law.
According to the Justice Ministry, murders of women increased by 1,400 per cent, from 66 to 953, between 2002 and 2009. A 2009 study also revealed that 42 per cent of Turkish women between the ages of 15 and 60 had suffered physical or sexual violence at the hands of their husbands or partners.
The 2021 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Turkey 133 out of 156 countries.
Recent years have seen an average of 400 femicides a year. In 2018, 440 women were murdered, a quarter at the hands of their husbands. In 2019, the number was 474, the highest in a decade. Most of the killers were partners or family members.
According to the We Will End Femicide platform, the most recent figures are inconclusive. In 2020, the courts registered 300 femicides, though another 171 women were killed under suspicious circumstances, some of which were ruled to be suicides.
Some of these alleged suicides have caused public outcry. In 2018, 23-year-old Şule Çet was raped and thrown from a window by her boss and his friend in the Ankara office where she worked. The killers claimed that she had committed suicide. The court ignored forensic evidence of strangulation, anal tearing and sedatives from the victim’s autopsy. Only after the murdered woman’s family and feminist organisations called for nationwide demonstrations did the courts reopen the case and sentence the two men to 18 years and a life sentence respectively in 2019.
Also in 2018, 35-year-old Ayten Kaya was found hanging in her home in Diyarbakir. The prosecutor concluded that it was a suicide and closed the case. But her relatives do not accept this version : the autopsy did not record the time of death and her body was covered with bruises that had occurred three days before she was found hanging, corresponding with the last time her husband, a seasonal worker, had been home.
“We don’t want to be killed !”
On 1 July 2021, the effective date of Turkey’s withdrawal from the Convention, thousands of women demonstrated in the country’s largest cities. The slogans on their signs included “Enforce the Istanbul Convention. Let’s put an end to femicide” and “Turkey is a giant cemetery for women.”
Amidst a sea of multi-coloured flags, lilac masks, rainbows, loudspeakers and drums, some signs displayed photographs of a dozen or so recently murdered women. Demonstrations by Turkish feminists and LGBTI activists, long a fixture on Istanbul’s famous Istiklal Avenue, have become increasingly fierce since current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began his Islamist and conservative drift more than a decade ago.
“I’m here because I don’t want any women to die in Turkey. If they withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, no woman will be safe here,” says Sibel, a 23-year-old demonstrator.
“We’re here to defend our rights as women because they want to take them away from us, same as with the LGBTI community. It’s so scary now to be a woman in Turkey [more so for non-heterosexual women]. No one is protecting us,” says another protester, Zeynep, 19, carrying a rainbow flag on her shoulders.
The previous week, police had attacked the Pride Parade in Istanbul and other Turkish cities with surprising levels of violence, making 47 arrests, the highest number on record. This comes at a time when attacks on the LGBTI community are increasing.
On 1 July, Turkish LGBTI lawyer and activist Yasemin Öz, co-founder of the Kaos Gay and Lesbian Association, spoke about the negative consequences of her country’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris in front of French President Emmanuel Macron.
“There were no other speakers from Turkey at the opening ceremony,” Öz told Equal Times. The forum brought together leaders from government, including US Vice President Kamala Harris, and the private sector and local and international NGOs to discuss gender equality strategies. “The fact that they invited a feminist and LGBTI activist instead of a senior Turkish official is kind of a diplomatic message from international leaders about which side they support,” she continues.
As Öz explains, Turkey’s Law 6284 represents “a vital measure for preventing domestic violence.”
“Women are done obeying the patriarchal roles imposed on them for centuries. They want equality. But those roles won’t be changed overnight. A lot of men resist change and put even more pressure on women. This pressure shouldn’t exist. The Istanbul Convention and global human rights standards provide a message and a roadmap to help build equality,” she adds.
As the president has no legal authority to pull the country out of international treaties, the Council of State, Turkey’s highest administrative court, had the final say on withdrawal. But according to analysts, the court yielded to a political decision, a further sign of erosion of the separation of powers.
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