A variety of small businesses line the historic streets of Karasokulu, a neighbourhood in Turkey’s southern coastal city of Adana. Among the limestone buildings near the city’s old clock tower, in a cosy shop decorated like a family sitting room, Fatma Arınç serves “mum’s köfte” – her own take on Adana’s famous speciality.
There are many other köfte restaurants in Adana, known as Turkey’s “city of the kebab”. But “Sister Fatoş”, as she is known to her customers, stands out because she’s the only female köfte chef in town.
Arınç began her career 20 years ago, on a small flat top grill she installed in the back yard of her family home. She upgraded to a food van after her first two years on the job, only moving into her shop this year after February’s devastating earthquakes buried her parking spot under rubble.
The 49-year-old has needed resilience and determination to keep her business afloat for so long. But a closer look at her story highlights the barriers that female entrepreneurs face in Turkey on a daily basis.
Scarce financing and training, a lack of role models or professional networks, caregiving responsibilities and gender-based violence are among the obstacles, Elif Özduran, spokesperson of the Women Entrepreneurs Association of Turkey (KAGIDER) told Inside Turkey.
“Trouble getting financing is the primary problem here and really presents a problem for female entrepreneurs,” Özduran said. “Female business owners who want to expand their operations also struggle with the tendency to prefer male operators in both public and private acquisitions.”
Arınç avoided some of these challenges as she inherited her capital, consumer base and business model from her father after he died in 2003. Even then, Arınç told Inside Turkey, she still needed to learn on the job as while her father was alive she had stayed at home to help with housework.
“We had to take over this business to save the day, I never thought it would get this far,” Arınç said. “I would have never dreamt up the idea of grilling köfte in the back of a food van, it wasn’t a line of business that would have crossed my mind.”
Hatice Berkcan, a cookery teacher at the municipal education centre in Adana’s Seyhan district, told Inside Turkey that a lot of the women who take her classes already know how to cook and come to learn tips and tricks.
“Some women attend because they want to get certificates to open up a shop,” Berkcan said, adding that while the classes gave them motivation to set up businesses, many women then struggled to find financing.
Özduran blamed Turkey’s patriarchal culture” for discouraging women from going into business.
“When a woman wants to work or start a business, they first need to make sure they’ve fulfilled all their duties at home and received the blessing of the man in the family,” she said.
Women like Arınç, who received comments like “what business does a woman have grilling köfte?” when she launched her business, have to take a stand against prejudice to succeed, Özduran noted.
For Arınç, a social and personal safety net helped her weather these difficulties.
“I wasn’t scared because I’m set up on the street I was born on, grew up on, that’s why I could stand my ground. I could have struggled or been scared off if I’d started somewhere else,” Arınç said.
“My husband gave me his support from the very beginning, maybe that’s why I felt so confident and marched ahead.”
It’s crucial to include women in the workforce, argued Özduran, since a failure to do so means losing the energy, intelligence and knowledge of half the population. Women in Turkey numbered 42.6 million at the end of 2022, according to data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK).
“Research shows that women’s equal participation would expand our country’s economy by 30 per cent and that women have the potential to contribute 13 trillion US dollars to the global economy by 2030,” Özduran continued.
Equal opportunities in education and business, and incentives geared toward female entrepreneurs, were needed to increase women’s presence in the workforce, Özduran said, adding, “Our research shows us that women entrepreneurs pick women for the first five paid positions they hire for. So the inclusion of women in the workforce will also boost employment exponentially.”
At the cookery school, Berkcan encourages her female students to sell their products. She passes on information about government funding for female entrepreneurs, or cooperatives where women go into business together.
Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan boasted about breaking the republic’s record for female employment at a women’s event during his presidential campaign in January.
“As I like to say at every opportunity, a society that leaves their women outside of daily life is keeping out half of its potential,” Erdoğan said.
But the statistics show that the Turkish workforce is far from balanced when it comes to gender. The most recent employment data provided by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) showed that women made up only 35.5 per cent of the workforce in June 2023, with 11.7 million women employed.
The most recent addition to Erdoğan’s ruling alliance, the Islamist Free Cause Party (HÜDAPAR), caused uproar among feminists during the election campaign this spring with a manifesto commitment to “women working in line with their disposition”. Critics saw this as an attack on women’s rights to work in whichever jobs they choose, although the party’s acting chair İshak Sağlam stated that his party was not against female employment “in line with her religion, faith and creation”.
Against a backdrop of radical political rhetoric, Arınç argued that women need to have ambition, self-confidence and support to be able to succeed.
“It’s a privilege to be successful as a köfte seller, as the only woman köfte seller, in the city of the kebab,” she said.