Iran’s decision to forbid women from studying dozens of subjects including nuclear physics and oil engineering threatens to wipe out one of the last vestiges of gender equality in the country, she wrote.
The Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Science, which oversees higher education, has barred women in 36 universities from 77 fields of study, according to the media. Female students have learned of the curbs when they received their registration letters in recent weeks.
Ebadi wrote in an open letter to the United Nations dated August 17 that the new rules “demonstrate that the Iranian authorities cannot tolerate women’s presence in the public arena.”
The restrictions follow gender-segregation guidelines that Science Minister Kamran Daneshju started to impose last year. But the regime has now shifted from merely segregating men and women to barring women from many fields of education.
About 52 percent of Iranian university students who graduated in 2009 were women, according to the latest data published by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Sixty-eight percent of science graduates were women, it said.
High unemployment among women graduating from science programs is a justification for the ban, the chancellor of the University of Esfahan, Mohammad Hossain Ramesht, told the Mehr news agency. About 98 percent of women who graduated from mine-engineering programs are without jobs, he said.
“We do not need female students at all,” said Gholam-Reza Rashed, head of the University of Petroleum Technology, Mehr reported. Difficult working conditions in Iran’s oil industry are the main reason for not admitting women, he said.
Ebadi, who lives in exile in Britain, wrote that the feminist movement “has witnessed significant growth in the past two decades.” But, she said, “The government is seeking to bar women’s access to education and active presence in society.”
Iran’s leaders are “pushing them back to into the house in the hope that they abandon their demands and leave the government alone to pursue its wrong policies,” she said.
Not all the fields barred to Iranian women in recent weeks are in science and engineering. Other subjects restricted to males when universities open next month include English literature, hotel management, computer science and accounting, according to media reports.
President Ahmadi-nejad, who has never accepted the regime’s policies on women and has even criticized mandatory hejab, opposed Daneshju’s push to segregate male and female students because it was “unscientific.”