Gender, Space, and Women’s Entrepreneurship: A Case Study in Kadıköy, Istanbul (2018–2023)

This study explores the evolving dynamics of women’s entrepreneurship in Kadıköy, Istanbul between 2018 and 2023, focusing on how structural inequalities, spatial context, and socio-economic crises shape women’s entrepreneurial trajectories. Based on two rounds of in-depth interviews with thirteen women entrepreneurs, the research highlights the persistent challenges posed by limited institutional support, gendered expectations, and economic volatility, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent inflationary period. While entrepreneurship is often framed as a pathway to empowerment, the findings show that it simultaneously reproduces precarity through unpaid care responsibilities, gendered moral norms, and spatially contingent access to opportunities. Women’s strategies of resilience such as resource-sharing and adapting business models, reflect individual ingenuity, but also reveal the lack of systemic support for gender-equitable entrepreneurship. The study emphasizes the importance of intersectional and place-based approaches to understanding how gender, class, and space interact to shape entrepreneurial agency in neoliberal and patriarchal contexts.