The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
The corona pandemic not only threatens the health and lives of people worldwide, it also has devastating effects on all economic, social and political aspects of human society. Negative economic growth, rising unemployment, inflation, poverty and hunger show the enormous dimensions of this catastrophe. In 2019, around 690 million people worldwide suffered from chronic hunger and malnutrition as a result of poverty. That number should already exceed almost a billion people.
A study by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization shows that around three billion people worldwide do not have adequate nutrition. The data published by the Iranian Statistics Center shows the same trend in Iran. It is important to note at this point that official statistics from the Iranian government are not necessarily trustworthy. Published data are very often criticized as incorrect by various authorities and institutions. Last spring, 41% of the total working-age population (15 years and older) was said to have been economically active. That is, in absolute numbers, a decrease of approx. 2.1 million compared to the previous year.
Of these, 1.02 million are women and 970,000 are men. During the same period, around 1.5 million additional people became unemployed. About 700,000 of them were women. The proportion of women among unemployed university graduates was 20.2 percent, while the proportion of men was 10.3 percent.
As a result, over a million women had to leave the labor market by last autumn. This trend is also evident in the proportion of women in the total number of employees. Last spring, a total of 19.5 million men and around 4 million women were employed. The proportion of women in employment was thus around 15 percent. In recent years, the Islamic Republic has given companies the opportunity to only employ workers on fixed-term contracts. The state itself is setting a good example. A year ago, the Ministry of Education said that thousands of teachers were missing. No institutions or persons responsible for filling these apprenticeships are willing to officially hire teachers with permanent employment contracts. Instead, soldiers, students and teachers are hired on a temporary basis.
The government justifies this approach with the budget deficit. This argument is used again and again for justification. Despite the budget deficit, the expenditures for religious foundations and institutions as well as for repressive organs in the state budget are not reduced. Even national development funds are used to finance them. Nursing is another sector that employs many women. Even in times of the corona pandemic, nurses are only hired on fixed-term contracts.
The vacancies in this important profession are therefore not fully filled even under normal circumstances. We can conclude that the gender discrimination in the labor market and the low percentage of women in this market (around one fifth of working men) is not only due to the dominance of patriarchy in this market and the greed of capitalists in the exploitation of cheaper.
From the beginning, the Islamic Republic has deliberately tried to exclude women from all social, political and economic areas by issuing religious and misogynistic guidelines and ordinances. Traditional roles for women are systematically promoted and everything is constantly being done to force them into the informal labor market, in which working conditions are poor and wages are lower.
Here the employees often have neither health insurance nor are their social security contributions paid. According to the OECD’s 2019 report on gender equality, Iran ranks 118th (3rd place from the bottom). According to a study by the World Bank from 2019, Iran ranks 187 in terms of legal equality between women and men, which is the last place. Another example of a better understanding of this development is the question of population growth, which Khamenei has repeatedly raised in recent years. In this context, a law was passed in 2015 containing general guidelines for “population and family development”.
Thereafter, the priority for employment in all government and non-government sectors is married men with children, then women with children and finally childless people. This plan defines and envisages the “economic” role for men and the “mother and wife” role for women. This plan should increase the total population of Iran to between 150 and 200 million. Today 6 years later, statistics on marriage, divorce and births show the utter failure of this plan. According to the national registry, the number of marriages decreased by 33 percent from 2013 to 2019.
The birth rate fell by around 22 percent over the same period. This development was to be expected. Because the worsening economic crisis is increasingly pushing more and more people below the poverty line. The cost of living is rising steadily, housing and rent are soaring, and unemployment is rising, especially among young people. No “government ordinance”, directive, propaganda or law can dispel these facts.
Four decades of discrimination, disadvantage, poverty, violence, unemployment, humiliation and oppression are the result of the religious regime of the Islamic Republic for Iranian women. This overall situation was exacerbated by the fatal consequences of the corona pandemic.
Those four decades and the current situation have resulted in Iranian women being a crucial opposition to the Islamic Republic in Iranian society. The Iranian rulers are aware of this potential and fear it. That is the reason why more and more women and girls who fight are punished very severely. No change can be made in Iranian society without women. Women have and will not stop fighting until a society is established without reactionary religious laws, in which equal rights do indeed exist, and in which all social, economic and political discrimination and disadvantage are eliminated.
KAAR INTERNATIONAL – May 2021
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