Anger as Iran bans women from universities

By Robert Tait

In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation byIran’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.