Sunday, February 27, 2011

Meanwhile, in Iran



The problem of universities filled with women appears to have been solved in a simple fashion: Maximum quotas to keep women out:
The head of Iran's Research and Planning Organization of Higher Studies has said that the number of male and female students in the Islamic republic is now equal.

Massoud Hadian Dehkordi has said that there are currently 3,790,859 students in the country, of which he said about 50.5 percent are men and about 49.5 percent women.

Previously it had been reported, based on official figures, that women made up 60-65 percent of university entrants.

Some Iranian officials had expressed worry over the rising numbers of women at universities, and said that it represented a threat to traditional values and that it would limit women's marriage opportunities.

In 2008, the Research Center of the Iranian parliament expressed concern over the trend, which it described as "alarming" and called on the government to stop it.
And so it seems to have been stopped. Engineering and medicine are two of the fields in which women now face maximum quotas.

But note the sentence I have bolded: Iranian sexists don't have to veil their words the way American ones do. Thus, we are never told the real reason why fewer women should go to college. But that reason is the very same one: to uphold traditional values of a patriarchal sort.