No, Iran Didn’t Just Ban Women From Universities. I awoke yesterday morning to a barrage of excited, fearful, and shocked emails and messages demanding to understand why Iran had suddenly decided to ban women from entering university. Given that Iranian women comprise over 60% of students in upper education in Iran and that women’s rights to education is deeply embedded in both the ideology and the practice of the Islamic Republic (as I have previously outlined regarding Islamic feminism in this piece), the idea that women could be “banned” from universities struck me as quite preposterous. Despite this, these rumors have gained steam, and the outrage provoked among feminists and those concerned with women’s rights in Iran has understandably led to a search for answers.
On August 20, Robert Tait published a bizarrely contradictory article entitled “Anger as Iran bans women from universities” in The Telegraph that suggests that women in Iran will be hereto banned from universities because of the worries of “senior clerics.” Women warriors on the frontlines for human rights - The Christian Science Monitor. More galleries Image 1/19: A Saudi Arabian woman drives a car as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, June 17, 2011. It’s been a little more than two years since the last time women in Saudi Arabia campaigned for the right to drive.
Activists have called for women to get behind the wheel in a new campaign Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013. Ultraconservatives are pushing back with protests, threats and even a cleric’s warning that driving a car damages a woman’s ovaries. An anti-government protester walks towards riot police, holding stones in her hands, during a protest asking for the release of human rights activists Nabeel Rajab and Zaynab al-Khawaja in the village of Sanabis west of Manama, Bahrain May 16, 2012. Pussy Riot stars Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who were released from prison in December, made their first public appearance in the US at a human rights concert. By Mesfin Fekadu, AP Music Writer / February 6, 2014. Iran’s Escalating Assault on Women. Pages: 1 2 While America’s college feminists lament the bitter struggles they face in getting someone to pay for their birth control, an all-too real war on college women is being waged as Iranian women are banned by the Islamist regime from study at Iran’s colleges and universities.
Among the nearly 80 fields of study apparently deemed inappropriate by the Iranian government for feminine academic pursuit include nuclear physics, engineering, computer science, chemistry business management, education and English. While one of the purported reasons cited by Iranian authorities for the decision was a lack of employer demand for women graduates, evidenced by an unemployment rate for women under 30 at 28 percent, Iranian Science Minister Kamran Daneshjoo claimed the main factor to be a need to find a greater “balance” in gender enrollment.
Laws. Iran's brutality toward women should shock West into seeking regime change. On June 20 2009, a beautiful young woman was standing alongside the road in Tehran, watching her fellow Iranians taking to the streets demanding freedom and protesting the most recent fraudulent presidential election. Neda Agha-Soltan looked on, perhaps in disbelief that, once again, the fanatic leaders of the Islamic Regime had stolen the hope of her generation for democracy, human dignity, and equality. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition Then, a shocking event took place that riveted the world’s attention on the cruelty of the Iranian leaders against their people. Today, while the world is celebrating International Women’s Day, honoring the women who have made the world a better place, it is essential that we remember the innocent women of Iran and what they’ve lost at the hands of a vicious regime.
The Islamic regime has taken this authority to its most heinous extreme. Anger as Iran bans women from universities. 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. "[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.