A qualitative research on the difficult lives of women who lost their jobs in İstanbul during the pandemic period

The aim of the study is to investigate how both the pandemic and job loss in the big city have changed their lives by making use of the narratives of women who lost their jobs while the pandemic period in Istanbul. In this research, a qualitative research method is going to be used to reveal the domestic burdens of women who are unemployed and earn low wages, their relations with the social environment, what has changed in their daily life, and how they experience the pandemic in urban life in the frame of the transformation that the coronavirus has made in working life. The existence of a consumption culture in cities that ruled by capitalism, the difficulty of work life and unemployment, inequalities among genders have deepened with the Covid-19 epidemic and also caused emotional and social issues on women. With the subject of this study, it is aimed to make visible the fragility and impoverishment experienced by women who lost their jobs because of the pandemic in urban life while this difficult process and to contribute to the literature on gender inequality, which is the field of sociology. Within the scope of the study, twenty-one women between the ages of 21-54 whom became unemployed and received low wages with the commence of the epidemic were interviewed. Keeping the age range of the interviewees wide allowed to understand and interpret the findings from a multi-layered, wide perspective. The interviews, which were made by following the feminist methodology and using the in-depth interview technique, were discussed in three parts in the study.