In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation by Iran's most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be "single gender" and effectively exclusive to men.
It follows years in which Iranian women students have outperformed men, a trend at odds with the traditional male-dominated outlook of the country's religious leaders. Women outnumbered men by three to two in passing this year's university entrance exam.
Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.
Under the new policy, women undergraduates will be excluded from a broad range of studies in some of the country's leading institutions, including English literature, English translation, hotel management, archaeology, nuclear physics, computer science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering and business management.
The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.
Writing to Ban Ki Moon, the UN secretary general, and Navi Pillay, the high commissioner for human rights, Mrs Ebadi, a human rights lawyer exiled in the UK, said the real agenda was to reduce the proportion of female students to below 50% – from around 65% at present – thereby weakening the Iranian feminist movement in its campaign against discriminatory Islamic laws.
"[It] is part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena," says the letter, which was also sent to Ahmad Shaheed, the UN's special rapporteur for human rights in Iran. "The aim is that women will give up their opposition and demands for their own rights."
The new policy has also been criticised by Iranian parliamentarians, who summoned the deputy science and higher education minister to explain.
However, the science and higher education minister, Kamran Daneshjoo, dismissed the controversy, saying that 90% of degrees remain open to both sexes and that single-gender courses were needed to create "balance".
Iran has highest ratio of female to male undergraduates in the world, according to UNESCO. Female students have become prominent in traditionally male-dominated courses like applied physics and some engineering disciplines.
Sociologists have credited women's growing academic success to the increased willingness of religiously-conservative families to send their daughters to university after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The relative decline in the male student population has been attributed to the desire of young Iranian men to "get rich quick" without going to university.
The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.
You know, even I have to admit I'd be uncomfortable with taking people's money to train them for a career when 98% of potential employers in-country just flat-out won't consider them.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
-- fgalkin
The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.
You know, even I have to admit I'd be uncomfortable with taking people's money to train them for a career when 98% of potential employers in-country just flat-out won't consider them.
You're kidding yourself if you think guilt has anything to do with it.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
General Zod wrote:You're kidding yourself if you think guilt has anything to do with it.
I'm not dumb enough to think the reasoning behind the government edict is so honourable, but I bet the universities have never had a chance to be honest about the post-graduation employment numbers before.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
-- (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)
Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
-- fgalkin
Not everyone who does a technical degree intends to work in the field, they could simply want a prestigious qualification that outranks BA equivalents in most people's* minds.
*locally, at least. Not to mention content of BA's would be heavily controlled by the mullahs anyway
The 2nd issue is industrial sexism. I remember helping at some job interviews for a Site Document Controller (halfway between manager and secretary). the site in question was in the middle of nowhere but the size of a small town itself.
The guy leading the interviews (a really nice guy who I've a lot of respect for professionally) initially rejected half the female candidates because they were unmarried, and the other half because they were married and it's not right for the mother to be away from her children.
Industry wide (although my office was pretty good) it was common for female engineering graduates to get stuck in secretary positions and never advance professionally, while their male peers moved rapidly between companies and sites.
While it's a serious problem, the solution isn't banning females from studying is it? It's waiting for a company to take advantage of the labour pool and start out-competing the rest.
"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Welcome to SDN, where we can't see the forest because walking into trees repeatedly feels good, bro." - Mr Coffee
The iranian religious government is trying to put the genie of social change back into the bottle and this won't work. They are trying to keep a social order stable that - from their point of view - is right. It's the age old 'risk averse' <-> 'open to new experiences' divide. But since Iran is actually a pretty westernized modern society, women won't return to the kitchen, just because some engineering programs are closed to them. IMHO this is just one of those ridiculous unhelpful last-ditch efforts conservatives make when change has become inevitable. Hopefully it means that even less people will be happy with Achmesomethingsomething being in power when the next election comes.
This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester
Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women, including declining birth and marriage rates.
then I'm surprised at the policy reversal. After the end of the Iraq-Iran War, Iran's government really started pushing family planning and other policies designed to get the birth rate down, and have been doing so ever since (which is one of the reasons why it's dropping quickly towards the replacement level).
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” -Jean-Luc Picard
"Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." -Margaret Atwood
I remember hearing that pre-Islamic revolution Iran also had a pretty high amount of females in universities. wonder if this is something unique to Persian culture. Also the "woman outnumber men in certain fields" is not surprising. I know Sweden removed its' gender requirements for universities when there was a noticeable majority of females in universities.
madd0ct0r wrote:that's an industry problem, not the university's.
Doesn't France limit the degrees for certain majors so that there are enough business jobs for business majors, etc?
"Opps, wanted to add; wasn't there a study about how really smart people lead shitty lives socially? I vaguely remember something about it, so correct me if I'm wrong. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that I'd rather let the new Newton or new Tesla lead a better life than have him have a shitty one and come up with apple powered death rays."
-Knife, in here
I remember hearing that pre-Islamic revolution Iran also had a pretty high amount of females in universities. wonder if this is something unique to Persian culture.
Iran/Persia was a pretty progressive state for a long period of time. You can say a lot of bad things about Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, but he was very intent on modernizing and Westernizing the country. The revolution and aftermath destroyed all of that.
Skgoa wrote:The iranian religious government is trying to put the genie of social change back into the bottle and this won't work. They are trying to keep a social order stable that - from their point of view - is right. It's the age old 'risk averse' <-> 'open to new experiences' divide. But since Iran is actually a pretty westernized modern society, women won't return to the kitchen, just because some engineering programs are closed to them. IMHO this is just one of those ridiculous unhelpful last-ditch efforts conservatives make when change has become inevitable. Hopefully it means that even less people will be happy with Achmesomethingsomething being in power when the next election comes.
Not really. It has long been a religious imperative in Iran for fathers to make sure that their daughters receive the highest level of education possible. (Curious sidenote: In the late 90s Iran almost went to war with Afghanistan, one of the common themes was that the Taliban was unIslamic and needed to be fought and eliminated, and one of the common themes thereof was the way that the Taliban treated women.) Iranian women outnumber men in most universities, and certainly in the most competitive fields inside Universities, and there has never been any real challenge to Iranian women receiving an education in the past twenty years (except for issues re: competing for university spots with veterans, and issues of classroom segregation at the secondary and primary school level in rural towns.)
The problem is that there is major cultural stigma with having women work for you, and especially of wives working and outproducing husbands. This has lead two cultural phenomenons. Firstly, Iranian women have a tremendous unemployment and underemployment rate because no one wants to hire them and husbands routinely don't want to let their wives have to work. Second, there's been a drought of qualified male candidates for jobs because women outcompete them for degree positions in important fields (like petroleum engineering) which leaves critical industries in peril because there's such a limited supply of male candidates who they'd be willing to hire. This is an attempt to rectify larger economic and industrial problems by increasing the number of male degree holders to alleviate this problem and, hopefully, get the Iranian economy back on track.
'After 9/11, it was "You're with us or your with the terrorists." Now its "You're with Straha or you support racism."' ' - The Romulan Republic
'You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)' - Darth Yan
