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Why Women Have Less Contribution In High Level Management Within Organizations Than Men In Iran?

When I was an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering major in Sharif University of Technology, in Iran, I was always wondering that among the department of Computer Engineering's student, why the proportion of female students willing to have TA or RA positions is less than male students, Although the numbers of female and male students enrolled in program was almost the same. When I looked at the faculty level, I saw that among 30 faculty members there was just one woman. If you look further in the society, this problem exists as well.

I, as a woman, was always anxious to know why. Is it just because of the male-dominated culture of Iran or that is because of nature of women that they do not want to or cannot do certain jobs especially in top management? I've always thought that this is because of a mixture of male-dominated culture -I will go through it later, but in general people, both men and women, think that a woman is not appropriate for management and they saw her greatest responsibility as wife and mother- and some characteristics of women -that they have less ambition to be in position of power compared to men. Therefore, I decided to study this problem to see what are the main barriers for women in Iran that, in general, they cannot make it.

In this essay, first I will have a brief introduction of Iran's culture and then go through various kind of common barriers and see which one exist in Iran. In some cases I used some studies that have been done in neighbor countries such as Turkey and Pakistan since no study has been done in the context of Iran and these countries are somewhat similar to Iran due to similar background and culture.

Where are women in Iran?

According to [1], participation of women in labour force increased over time: from 17.9% in 1960 to 20.5% and 25.9% respectively in 1979 (Iran's revolution) and 1999 to its 2004 level of 33%. Despite improvements, this ratio is still low compared to those of developed countries...