A birthday cake is placed at the conference table at WomanTV, a three-month-old news station that provides in-depth coverage of women’s issues in Turkey. Men and women, mostly in their early 30s, wait for Duygu Ozel Tapan to get out of the studio so they can cut the cake that will mark the presenter’s birthday.

“It is a good team – we both work hard and enjoy working together,” Ahu Ozyurt, the editor-in-chief of WomanTV, told Al-Monitor. “We are around 60 people – men and women of all ages. It is a channel about women’s issues, but we have never intended it to be a women-only team. Our aim is to change the language of coverage on women – which seems to center around women as either victims of violence or happy consumers of cooking or fashion programs on TV.”

WomanTV’s broadcasts started Dec. 24 against a gloomy backdrop of increasing femicides and domestic violence in the country. According to the We Will Stop Femicides Platform, a non-governmental group with a strong organization and network all around Turkey, 440 women were killed by men in 2018. Femicides in 2019 so far number 86. On March 8, International Women's Day, WomanTV, like most TV stations in Turkey, started the morning news with a report that a Mongolian woman had been killed by her boyfriend in Istanbul.

Although violence is perceived as the biggest problem of women in Turkey, according to a 2018 poll by Kadir Has University, women of the country suffer from inequality on a wide range of issues from employment to political rights. The World Economic Forum’s gender gap index placed Turkey at 130th place among 149 in 2018. While recording progress on closing its gender gap in labor force participation as well as professional and technical roles, the report warns of worsening wage inequality for similar work. It also says that Turkey improved the share of women in parliament, though 17% (up from 14.7% in the previous parliament) falls considerably short of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's average of 28.8%.