[lbo-talk] Iran: World Bank Gender Stats

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Wed Aug 16 06:57:40 PDT 2006


On 8/16/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Aug 16, 2006, at 6:47 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > The World Bank Gender Stats for Iran should be useful, for it allows
> > us to compare it with other countries in the "Middle East & North
> > Africa" and other "Lower Middle Income" countries:
> > <http://devdata.worldbank.org/genderstats/genderRpt.asp?
> > rpt=profile&cty=IRN,Iran,%20Islamic%20Rep.&hm=home>.
>
> And they're not that impressive - adult literacy for women is 70%,
> compared with 86% for other lower-middle-income countries. Labor
> force is 33% female in Iran, vs. 42% in other LMI countries. Of
> course, your prince is still relatively new in office, so maybe we
> should give him time?

For adult women, stats are not that impressive in comparison to the LMI average, but they are not what many Westerners usually imagine, and generally better than the Middle East/North Africa average (e.g., the labor force participation rate in Iran is 33% and the Middle East/North Africa average is 27%. The trend seems promising to me, too: e.g, the primary completion rate for females went up from 81% in 1990 to 97% in 2004, topping both the LMI average of 96% and the Middle East/North Africa average of 86%. What is interesting is a great leap in contraceptive use, considering that this is, after all, an Islamic republic: from 23% in 1980 to 74% in 2000, compared to the 2004 LMI average of 76% and the 2004 Middle East/North Africa average of 59%. Iran's fertility rate is now 2.1, the same as the LMI average and better than the Middle East/North Africa average of 3.0.

You may compare them to (still officially) secular Egypt's stats and trends <http://devdata.worldbank.org/genderstats/genderRpt.asp?rpt=profile&cty=EGY,Egypt,%20Arab%20Rep.&hm=home>.

As for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he assumed the presidency last August; and power in Iran is much more distributed, ultimate control on many things still resting in the hands of Ali Khamenei. I doubt that conditions of women in Iran would be all that different from what they are now even if you or I were running the country.

In any case, what Iranian women have achieved ought to be publicized better, so that Americans and others can see that it is worth defending from the threat of economic sanctions and worse. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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