“It’s a Men’s Club”
Discrimination Against Women in Iran’s Job Market
httpss://www.hrw.org/report/2017/05/24/its-mens-club/discrimination-against-women-irans-job-market
“I am a mechanical engineer and I was interviewed for a position in Iran’s oil and gas fields […]. My contact in the company told me that they really liked me, but that they did not want to hire a woman to go to the field.”
− Naghmeh, a 26-year-old woman from the city of Tehran
“I often impress my boss through points I raise about programming, but I rarely get the chance to participate in the decision-making process. Once my boss told me to come and explain my points in a meeting, but then he immediately retracted his suggestion, saying that it’s not a good idea since it’s a men’s club.”
− Safoura, who works for consulting company in Tehran
In July 2015, Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council Germany, and the European Union (EU), reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. This resolution marked a historic breakthrough in which Iran began to re-engage with and re-integrate into the global economy. In the first six months of 2016, trade between the EU and Iran – described by the United Kingdom Secretary of State for International Trade as “the biggest market to enter the global economy since the fall of the Soviet Union”– increased by 43 percent. President Hassan Rouhani, who championed the deal, promised that all Iranians would benefit economically as a result. Yet without serious reforms to Iran’s legal code and labor regulations, Rouhani’s rhetoric will remain detached from the daily reality of a critical constituency in Iran and one which makes up half of the country’s population: Iranian women.
Women in Iran confront an array of legal and social barriers, restricting not only their lives but also their livelihoods, and contributing to starkly unequal economic outcomes. Although women comprise over 50 percent of university graduates, their participation in the labor force is only 17 percent. The 2015 Global Gender Gap report, produced by the World Economic Forum, ranks Iran among the last five countries (141 out of 145) for gender equality, including equality in economic participation. Moreover, these disparities exist at every rung of the economic hierarchy; women are severly underrepresented in senior public positions and as private sector managers. This significant participation gap in the Iranian labor market has occurred in a context in which Iranian authorities have extensively violated women’s economic and social rights. Specifically, the government has created and enforced numerous discriminatory laws and regulations limiting women’s participation in the job market while also failing to stop – and sometimes actively participating in – widespread discriminatory employment practices against women in the private and public sectors.
Discrimination against women in the Iranian labor market is shaped in part by the political ideology that has dominated Iran since the Islamic revolution, which pushed women to adopt perceived “ideal roles” as mothers and wives and sought to marginalize them from public life. Yet what often goes unmentioned in narratives on women’s role in Iranian society is that discriminatory laws towards women in the economic realm long predate this period. Many discriminatory laws can be found in Iran’s 1936 civil code. After the Islamic Republic of Iran came to power in 1979, the authorities rolled back the progress made by legislation enacted in 1976 promoting gender equality, particularly in family law, and returned to these earlier legal provisions while also enforcing a dress code as a prerequisite for appearing in public life. In the past three decades, authorities have punished women’s rights activists for their efforts to promote gender equality in law and practice, including with imprisonment. The government’s prosecution of prominent members of the “One Million Signatures” campaign to change these discriminatory laws also illustrates that the battle for women’s social and economic freedoms cannot be disentangled from the broader struggle for political and civic rights in Iran.
Extract only. For the full article, go here: httpss://www.hrw.org/report/2017/05/24/its-mens-club/discrimination-against-women-irans-job-market
Read The Gender Trap: Women, Violence and Poverty, available here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/act770092009en.pdf