Turkey’s government has made no secret of its desire to boost birth rates and strengthen the traditional nuclear family. But its ambitions clash with the relatively meagre maternity leave working mothers receive – just 16 weeks paid leave as standard – and a lack of publicly-funded daycare centres. Its proposed solution, unveiled last year as part of a wider initiative that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dubbed the Year of the Family, is the “neighbourhood mum” project. This pilot for community-based …

“These places are graves for living humans,” says Serkan Onur Yılmaz, a former inmate of one of Turkey’s new high-security prisons. Introduced in 2021, they have been labelled “well-type prisons” by inmates and human rights advocates – who compare incarceration in such structures to being stuck at the bottom of a well. “[My cell] didn’t get any sun,” says Ali Hasan Akgül, another former inmate. “You got maybe a single ray if you were lucky. It’s not possible to look …

The heavy gates of a seemingly ordinary wedding hall close on a busy street in Istanbul. The city’s bustle is shut out, replaced by the bass indoors. With her chic headscarf and sequin dress, Tuğba Dağlar stands at the DJ booth. To kick off the evening, she reads out a manifesto to the hundreds of women standing in the hall. “Leave your identity, your motherhood, your career, your marital issues beyond those doors. Here we are just women – and …

“Life after the earthquake has been really hard, but coming to a game even for just an hour gives me a breather – it’s empowering” says Sakine Özelci. Like thousands of others, Özelci has been living in a container home – with her family of four – since the earthquakes that struck southern Turkey in February 2023. Football is one of the things that has kept her going. Özelci’s team is called the Gökyüzü Şutlayıcıları (“Sky Shooters”). It was established …

In a courtyard in Hatay, southern Turkey, a group of women are dressed in their best clothes as they get ready for their first concert, after months of practice. They look over the lyrics one last time, the seating chart is finalised and the instruments are tuned. Then, the music starts. “When we were young,” the conductor Abir Naeseh Bilgin starts singing, as the choir joins in, “how we used to stroll hand in hand on the streets…” Abir Naaseh …

Recent statements by Turkey’s state-backed Islamic authority, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), have inflamed long-running debates about women’s rights and the role of religion in public life. The Diyanet’s Friday sermons, delivered simultaneously in nearly 90,000 mosques each week, function as a religious guide for millions in Turkey. Yet recent sermons have carried messages that appear to align with the government’s stance on a range of social issues, from women’s clothing and personal freedom, to inheritance rights and LGBT+ …

Nearly three decades after global pledges for gender equality in the media, women remain severely underrepresented in news content. According to the latest Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) – the world’s longest-running study on gender in the news – in 2025, women accounted for only 26% of all news subjects and sources worldwide. Although this is a gradual improvement from 2005, when the figure stood at 14%, it still reflects persistent structural imbalance. While GMMP’s 2025 findings also reveal that …

“As a woman, you are always out of place,” says psychologist Ece Önder, reflecting on the pressures of her job. Although women therapists form the backbone of Turkey’s mental health services, they still face obstacles on account of their gender. Önder, who specialises in trauma and disasters, tells Inside Turkey that women are deemed “inexperienced” when they’re young, “strict” when they are older, “soft” when they are compassionate, and “cold” when they are detached. Berçem Göktürk, a clinical psychologist, shares …

“Being a stay-at-home youth makes me feel like I’m not self-sufficient, like I’m dependent on my family,” says 24-year-old Atlas Ay in a cafe in İstanbul’s bustling Beşiktaş district. Staring at a cup of tea in front of him, shoulders hunched over, his voice trembles when he speaks. “It makes me depressed and angry, first at myself and then at the circumstances of the country where I live.” Ay is a university graduate – but, he says, that’s no longer …

“You can’t have breakfast without braided cheese. I feel like I haven’t eaten if it isn’t on the table,” says 58-year-old Nermin Akay as cheese is weighed out in a shop in the historic bazaar of Turkey’s south-eastern Diyarbakır province. A couple of shops down, 60-year-old Sinan Kutlu examines a slab of braided cheese he is holding. “Karacadağ Mountain milk is just different,” he says. “It tastes like my childhood.” Diyarbakır’s famous braided cheese. Credit: Gülistan Korban A vendor of …