The ideal of gender equality was embraced after the declaration of the Republic of Turkey by the administration of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose modernising reforms included a ban on polygamy and the provision of full political rights to Turkish women by 1930.

The participation of Turkish women in the labor force is less than half of that of the European Union average, and while several campaigns have been successfully undertaken to promote female literacy, there is still a gender gap in secondary education.

After the 1980 Turkish coup d'état, women from both urban and academic milieus began to meet in reading groups and discuss feminist literature together.

In these "awareness-raising groups",[27] which were established notably in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir, they criticized the standard construction of the family as well as the gender-specific role behavior that was forced on women.

These campaigns arose due to women's wish to reject the traditional patriarchal code of ethics, honor, and religion, which left men to decide the fate of the female body.

The first wave of Turkish feminism occurred in the early 20th century, when women's organizations began to demand equality in civic and political rights.

The organization then set up hidden video cameras, which purport to show male passersby kicking and ripping off the cutouts' arms and legs.

[43] According to the We Will Stop Femicides Platform (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durduracağız Platformu), more than 157 women were murdered by men in Turkey from January 2020 - July 2020.

[66] World famous celebrities have joined Turkish women's social media campaign with the hashtag #ChallengeAccepted, in order to put an end to domestic violence in Turkey.

[47] In May 2011, the Human Rights Watch said in a report that Turkey's flawed family violence protection system leaves women and girls across the country unprotected against domestic abuse.

[74] In November 2017, according to a study conducted by a student at Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, mentioned that 28.5 percent of the respondents said they have witnessed domestic abuse.

[75] A total of 365 women were killed by men in the first 11 months of 2017, according to data compiled by the "We Will Stop Femicide" activist platform based on news reported in the media.

The report also stressed that women who are victims of sexual abuse tend to be neglected by their families, which pushes them to undertake independent measures for their self-protection.

It was conceived in 2012 as a device to generate public awareness concerning the rising number of deaths due to domestic violence[80] and to keep track of this data that is often suppressed, and largely unknown.

[82] In June 2017, a female university student, Asena Melisa Sağlam, was attacked verbally and physically by a man on a bus in Istanbul for wearing shorts during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

[81][83] Also, later on the same month a woman was harassed on the street in Istanbul when a man accused her of wearing provocative clothing, saying she should be careful because she was "turning people on.

[81] Also, later on the same month the security chief of the Maçka Democracy Park in the Şişli district of Istanbul verbally abused a young woman for the way she was dressed and he also called the police.

[86][87] In September 2017, at Ankara, neighbors complained to the manager of an apartment building about a woman for wearing shorts at her home, demanding that she must keep her curtains closed.

[88] In March 2018, a teacher at a religious vocational high school in Konya was dismissed from his post over comments he made about female students wearing gym clothes.

The result of this is that many injustices within Turkey, including systematic rapes carried out in prisons to maintain power over communities, go unheard by the rest of the world.

[94] According to researchers, one of the important reasons for the high number of honor killings is that punishments are not harsh and laws and legal applications protect the perpetrators.

Such a case was on 13 January 2009, where a Turkish Court sentenced five members of the same family to life imprisonment for the honor killing of Naile Erdas, a 16-year-old Kurdish girl who got pregnant as a result of rape.

[4] A survey where 500 men were interviewed in Diyarbakir found that, when asked the appropriate punishment for a woman who has committed adultery, 37% of respondents said she should be killed, while 21% said her nose or ears should be cut off.

[105][106][107] In 2008, critics have pointed out that Turkey has become a major market for foreign women who are coaxed and forcibly brought to the country by international mafia to work as sex slaves, especially in big and touristic cities.

[112] In 2015, the Turkish model, Didem Soydan, tweeted that she had received abusive text messages, after testifying and giving her cell phone number to police in the case of a woman who was forced into a car after being beaten.

Most of those facilities are run by the Family, Labor and Social Services Ministry while others are operated by municipalities, the Immigration Authority (Göç İdaresi) and the Purple Roof (Mor Çatı), an NGO.

[133] On 19 June 2018, the European Court of Human Rights has fined Turkey 11,000 euros over the government-owned electricity distribution company's refusal to appoint a woman as a security officer on account of her gender.

In October 1999 the female applicant, Hülya Ebru Demirel, passed a civil service exam and was informed that she would be appointed as a security officer at the Kilis branch of the Turkish Electricity Distribution company (TEDAŞ).

[135] In September 2020, a female politician of Kurdish origin Sebahat Tuncel was sentenced to 11 months in prison for calling Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan an enemy of women in a speech in 2016.

[144] The 2006 survey found that, compared to a previous study carried out in 1999, the number of women who employ headcoverings had increased in rural areas, but decreased in cities.