Literature review: the future of work: women and politics
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mehidizadeh2011.pdf
International Labour Review, Vol. 150 (2011), No. 3–4
Copyright © The author 2011 Journal compilation © International Labour Organization 2011
Gender and reconciliation of work and family in Iran
Narjes MEHDIZADEH*
Abstract. The problem of work–family balance has not yet been articulated in devel- oping countries as it has been in the developed countries, though work–family ten- sions are growing in developing countries as well. Against this background, the author examines the distribution of female employment in Iran and considers its pos- sible determinants – with female labour force participation a mere 12.5 per cent in 2006. Drawing on a survey of 800 highly educated mothers, she highlights the crucial need for better childcare facilities to improve women’s work–family balance and labour force participation, arguing for a policy approach combining formal/in- formal childcare with working time regulation.
he vocabulary of work–life balance, family-friendly policies and work–T family balance has seldom been used in the Islamic Republic of Iran – or elsewhere in the Middle East (Mehdizadeh, 2010). Yet work–family tensions are also apparent in developing countries, and they look set to grow. As Cover- man (1989) has argued, there needs to be a serious examination of policy options in these countries as role conflict is more likely to occur in situations where no mechanism exists to help individuals fulfil their different roles. Indeed, women’s low labour force participation in the Middle East is all too easy to dismiss as culturally induced without considering the effect of the lack of pol- icies that support a sound work– life balance.
In order to assess the extent to which that effect contributes to the low level of employment among mothers, this paper examines the experiences and attitudes toward work and care of a sample of Iranian women with post-second- ary education, i.e. the most likely to enter the labour market. With reference to
* School of Law and Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, email: mnmehdi@hot mail.com. The author wishes to thank the Institute of Labour and Social Security of Iran for financial support of this research project and Emeritus Professor Gill Scott for her valuable comments.
Responsibility for opinions expressed in signed articles rests solely with their authors, and publication does not constitute an endorsement by the ILO.
406 International Labour Review
the strategies developed in Europe, it then considers the policies that would need to be introduced in Iran to reconcile work and family and to ensure the realization of women’s potential as reflected in their rising educational attain- ment. It is not easy to replicate policies that have worked elsewhere, but discus- sion of the reasons for change and the impact of change in some developed countries could be a valuable source for policy development in Iran.
Barriers to women’s employment and neglect of work–family reconciliation strategies Although female labour force participation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is rising faster than in some other developing countries, labour force statistics show that women’s employment rates in the region are the lowest in the world (Shafik, 2001; IBRD/World Bank, 2007). Indeed, the increase in their participation is mostly concentrated in the urban informal sector, as a result of the migration of less educated and younger women from rural areas.1 Mean- while, women’s formal employment is heavily concentrated in lower-level white-collar jobs, and they are under-represented in managerial and profes- sional occupations2 despite the increase in numbers of educated women. In fact, occupational segregation is more extreme in the MENA than in other regions (Doumato and Posusney, 2003). As shown in figure 1, the gender gap in eco- nomic activity rates is particularly wide in Iran.
Several scholars have put forward theories on the determinants of women’s employment rates in the Middle East (e.g. Momsen, 2004; Haghighat, 2005; Kar- shenas and Moghadam, 2006). Predominant are the cultural theorists: Youssef (1974), for example, has argued that female employment rates are largely dependent on the interaction between women’s particular response to their labour market position and the employment opportunities actually available to them, both of which are closely related to each society’s cultural definition of the type of work considered appropriate for women. She concludes that female par- ticipation rates in Middle Eastern countries may therefore have little to do either with the level of economic development or with the structure of demand in the labour market.
Cultural explanations, however, are not the only ones. Studies of women’s employment in European societies have highlighted the significance of welfare
1 Iran’s informal sector includes wage workers in private enterprises employing fewer than ten workers, various types of unpaid family labour and workshops that hire wage labour for carpet weaving and other handicrafts or simple commodity production, e.g. dried herbs, pickles, jam, blan- kets, etc. (Rostami Povey, 2005, p. 6).
2 Albeit not in large numbers, women can be found in professional occupations and decision- making positions in Iran. For example, the number of female candidates for parliament increased from 66 in 1980 to 585 in 2008. The number of women elected to urban and rural Islamic councils has also increased, from 1,375 in 1998 to 1,491 in 2006. Furthermore, there have been two women in the Ministerial Cabinet for many years and, in 2009, a woman was appointed Minister of Health and four others as presidential advisers. In addition, the number of women’s NGOs, which have an influence on policy, increased from 55 in 1996 to 980 in 2007.
Gender and reconciliation of work and family in Iran 407
408 International Labour Review
and work–family policies in this respect (see, for example, Gornick, Meyers and Ross, 1997; Tomlinson, 2006). So before Iran’s low rates of female employment are attributed solely to attitudes, one also needs to consider the country’s neglect of such welfare provisions. Yet, in post-revolutionary Iran, there has been con- siderable political commitment to the promotion of women’s rights, albeit within the confines of Islamic doctrine. Partly as a result of this, Iranian women have shown remarkable attainment both in university entrance examinations and in their academic performance in various fields (Mehdizadeh and Scott, 2008). Many scholars believe that the underlying policy changes of recent decades dem- onstrate the potential of policy for transforming the role of women in Iran’s labour market as well (Bahramitash and Kazemipour, 2006; Taleb and Goodarzi, 2004; Mehdizadeh, 2010). But while women’s mass participation in education – accounting for 58.6 per cent of university admissions in 2006 – has resulted in some changes in the relationship between education/training and employment (Shanahan, Mortimer and Kruger, 2002), their educational achievement is not matched by a similar improvement in labour market outcomes: the female labour force participation rate in 2006 was only 12.5 per cent (Statistical Centre of Iran, 2007).
If Iran is to gain from women’s clearly established capacity to take advan- tage of higher education in a way that benefits the economy and women them- selves, there is a need to explore some of the reasons why this has not happened – and particularly why this paradox is most keenly experienced by educated mothers (Mehdizadeh and Scott, 2011). The argument of this paper is that the key factors underlying to the paradox of high numbers of female graduates com- bined with a low rate of female graduate employment lie not so much in trad- itional patriarchal attitudes or Islamization (Bahramitash and Salehi Esfahani, 2009; Mehdizadeh, 2010) as in the weakness of state support for women’s employment and a lack of childcare and work-related welfare/support policies to meet working mothers’ need and preference for the reconciliation of work and care (Mehdizadeh, 2010; Mehdizadeh and Scott, 2011).
According to the ILO, one of the key linkages that need to be made to improve the gender balance in the labour market is that between the care econ- omy and paid work: “The care economy includes most of women’s unpaid work as well as the public and private provision of social services. Women are ham- pered in finding paid jobs because of their family responsibilities” (ILO, 2005, p. 42). Thus, it can be argued that a better understanding of women’s experi- ences and stronger work-related welfare/support policies would be key to a smoother transformation of women’s role in the labour market of Iran (Mehdi- zadeh, 2010; Mehdizadeh and Scott, 2008 and 2011).
Distribution of women’s employment in Iran According to Iran’s most recent census, in 2006, 36.6 per cent of employed women worked in the services sector, 31.8 per cent in manufacturing and 31.6 per cent in agriculture; 59.7 per cent of them were in the private sector and 37.3 per cent
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410 International Labour Review
in the public sector. However, women are distributed across fewer occupational categories than men, such as agriculture and weaving (mostly carpets) in villages, and education, health and social work in cities. This also applies to educated women: the statistics for 2004 show that 65 per cent of employed women with higher education were working in the educational sector, 14.6 per cent in the health and social work sector, and only 20.4 per cent in other sectors, while 28.8 per cent of men with a higher education background were working in the educational sector, 6.1 per cent in the health and social work sector, and the remaining 65 per cent – i.e. the majority – worked in other sectors. These statistics show that the education and health sectors have offered the greatest attraction for women with higher education. Table 1 breaks down female employment by educational level in the main occupational categories, according to the census of 2006.
In 1996, 42.8 per cent of male legislators, high-ranking public servants and managers had a higher education, while the proportion was 60.1 per cent among their female counterparts. The proportions had increased to 46.3 and 79 per cent, respectively, by 2003. Women’s access to high-level managerial jobs is thus more restricted than it is for men, and typically subject to higher qualifications than men’s. The proportion of female university teaching staff in Iran is 20 per cent, considerably less than in other MENA countries, such as Algeria (41 per cent), Tunisia (40 per cent), Turkey (38 per cent), and Bahrain (36 per cent) (Mogh- adam, 2009). Since women’s under-representation in certain occupations could be due to conflict between work and family responsibilities, particularly child- care, this issue will be explored in the following section.
Mothers’ employment experiences in Iran This section is based on a survey I conducted in 2005 among educated mothers with school-age children in the city of Shiraz. With a population of 1.7 million, Shiraz is the major commercial and industrial centre of southern Iran and hosts one of the largest universities of the region.
The survey inquired into the experiences and attitudes of 800 mothers with post-secondary education and was combined with interviews of a sub-sample.3 Just under half of the respondents were working at the time of the survey; one- third reported they would like to be working, and one-fifth reported they were not working and did not wish to. The proportion of employed women in the sur- vey is above the national average, but the sample was selected to include as many working mothers as possible, and only women with a post-secondary education.4 Of those who were working, more than three-quarters were employed in the public sector, predominantly in education and health care; 8 per cent were self- employed, and only 4 per cent were working in the private sector.
3 The survey results and interview reports are available from the author on request. 4 In the autumn of 2005, the unemployment rate among female graduates was about 24 per
cent, as against 10.9 per cent among male graduates. About 35.5 per cent of unemployed women had higher education qualifications, while the proportion among men was only 13.9 per cent.
Gender and reconciliation of work and family in Iran 411
Analysis of the mothers’ experience of work showed up a number of inter- esting features. In particular, 51 per cent felt that the most important role of women was to be carers/home makers. Of those in employment: • 65 per cent were working full time, although 49 per cent would have pre-
ferred to be working part time; • 63 per cent were satisfied with the type of job they were doing; • 65 per cent were in teaching, with a further 13 per cent in other public sec-
tor jobs; • 54 per cent gave financial independence as their reason for working; • 61 per cent felt their husbands approved of them working, but 24 per cent
felt their husbands did not approve; • 31 per cent felt it was very difficult to combine work with motherhood.
Lack of childcare centres, particularly for school-age children, clearly cre- ated tension for mothers, often causing them either not to work or to leave their job. Only 8 per cent said there was no difficulty making childcare arrangements to cover periods when they were working and children were not in school; 33 per cent reported severe difficulty in making such arrangements. Overall, 89 per cent indicated that after-school care facilities were very necessary, with the majority of non-working mothers reporting that the non-availability of childcare had influenced their decision not to work. Indeed, “difficulty with childcare arrange- ments” was the major reason why some mothers were not working: some 35.5 per cent of the respondents who were not working at the time of the survey felt that this was the case, while a further 17.8 per cent of respondents reported that “re- striction by husband” was the main problem. Moreover, the main reason for the husband’s disapproval – expressed by most of the mothers in this category – was “paying less attention to children and husband”. A mother’s satisfaction with her job depended on her being sure that her children were well treated, and if they felt that their children would feel neglected, their motivation for work was reduced. Only 16.5 per cent of the respondents who were not in employment believed that “shortage of job opportunities” was the reason for them not work- ing. Analysis of the data also showed that mothers who spent more time with their children were more satisfied.5
Many of the respondents – educated mothers – reported that they had not actually attempted to find a job because they felt that they had no hope of find- ing suitable employment that would fit in with their family responsibilities.
When men are busy, women should compensate for that. Because my husband is working in several cities, I have to do everything to do with the home. This is the reason that a woman like me cannot work. (Interview reports, non-working mother No. 14.)
5 This strongly concurs with the findings of Van Drenth, Knijn and Lewis, who compared single parents’ motives for taking up a job instead of relying on welfare in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands: “better-educated Dutch mothers prefer to stay at home at least part of the week with young children” (1999, p. 624); also, in both countries, some women were committed to full-time jobs and others to part-time jobs, although it is very difficult to say how much this is a consequence of choice, as Hakim (1996) believes, or a constraint.
412 International Labour Review
While 47.1 per cent of the employed respondents indicated that they had not thought about leaving their job, the majority of them (52.9 per cent) said they had. Of those in the latter group, 45.5 per cent said this was because of childcare, 19.3 per cent felt tired of work, and 15.9 per cent indicated that “domestic affairs” were the reason. Furthermore, hours of work and career prospects were clearly affected by childcare responsibility:
I prefer to work in an education authority because of their hours of work and holi- days. I was working in the Ministry of Health; I had to work during summer holidays too. I also had to work until 2.30 pm every day. … for the sake of my children I changed my work to the education authority. (Interview reports, work- ing mother No. 3.)
I guess I can resign. At the beginning of this year, I tried to organize my working hours with my child’s school schedule, but it ended up in an argument. (Interview reports, working mother No. 11.)
It is excellent: the Government provides an opportunity for women to work part time or to do shift work with the same hours as my children’s school hours, so my work shift changes with my children’s. (Interview reports, working mother No. 5.)
A key issue highlighted in these comments is of course the difficulty of combining childcare and work, but it is not the sole issue. The women in the sample were highly committed to family life: almost all of these educated mothers indicated that they would choose family over work. Beyond their expressed commitment, however, the point is that the burden of childcare and family responsibilities appears to fall exclusively on women, thus affecting their availability for employment. For example, in a survey on working women’s problems conducted by the Tehran Media Centre in 1999, 60 per cent of the respondents approved of women working outside the home and 22 per cent expressed conditional approval. The dominant opinion of those in the latter group was that women could work outside the home “as long as no harm is done to the home and life and husband and child”. However, 98 per cent of respondents mentioned family responsibilities as the main obstacle to women’s employment, and 68 per cent of the married working women were of the opinion that their work outside the home had affected “their duties” inside the home.
In a study designed to evaluate women’s household work and related atti- tudes among 400 non-working women in Tehran, Jazani (2004) found that although looking after children, shopping and responsibility for children’s edu- cation were considered as women’s household work, activities such as collect- ing children from school and looking after the elderly were not considered part of women’s domestic role. Jazani’s investigation also found that the majority of women choose a housekeeping role because of social and cultural constraints and their responsibility for looking after small children. In addition, the major- ity of women in her study believed that household affairs were unquestionably the responsibility of women and that, for the sake of the country’s economic development, it was therefore important that women be paid wages for work-
Gender and reconciliation of work and family in Iran 413
ing at home. However, they also reported that they enjoyed that responsibility, although the majority believed that employed women were undervalued in their society.
While previous studies such as Jazani’s (2004) have highlighted the import- ance of women’s responsibilities at home as an obstacle to their employment, none of them has paid much attention to the role of childcare policies in Iran.
Reconciliation of work and family: Policy directions in Iran Women’s growing labour force participation has been the main driving force behind the work–family reconciliation policies that have been introduced across the developed countries in the past few decades. Policy packages vary across the different countries, but seldom to the extent of the minimal intervention found in many developing countries where it is often assumed that families should make themselves available for childcare or be prepared to pay for it on the mar- ket. “Minimal intervention may be due to the assumption in some developing societies that family solidarity enables most workers to cope with family respon- sibilities” (Hein, 2005, p. 15). Such assumptions, however, are becoming ques- tionable – not to say unrealistic – as a result of social changes such as migration, urbanization, changes in household and family structures and the lack of resources to address work–family problems. As one interviewee reported:
He [my child] has to be left alone at home when I am working. … I have some relatives in Shiraz, but they have their own problems as they are also working mothers. (Interview reports, working mother No. 1.)
Developing a policy response more appropriate to changing conditions, however, is not easy. Working time provisions and leave entitlements, for example, are two key areas of labour legislation which affect the ability of workers to reconcile family responsibilities and work, and they have been lib- eralized somewhat in Iran. Nevertheless, the effective implementation of laws and regulations is fraught with difficulties (Feldman, Masalha and Nadam, 2001; Hein, 2005). Laws and regulations exist in principle but are often not implemented.
Under the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a woman can be an employee, like a man, provided that her job is lawful and humane, is accom- plished with regard to Islamic rules, and is neither detrimental to family duties, nor a cause of controversy and disturbance within the family (Iran, 1979). Woman’s work and care reconciliation strategies are not ruled out by this, even if they are constrained. Iran’s welfare strategies have generally been designed to secure the right to receive care (e.g. state responsibility for childcare, help with childcare fees) and the right to time for care (e.g. leave opportunities for part- time work). For example, paragraph 107 of the Charter of Women’s Rights and Responsibilities in the Islamic Republic of Iran also emphasizes the “right to enjoy facilities, standards and rules proportionate to women’s family (as a wife
414 International Labour Review
and mother) responsibilities in their hiring, employment, promotion and retire- ment during the period of employment” (Supreme Council of the Cultural Revo- lution, 2004, p. 20).6
Accordingly, Parliament has enacted legislation to support working mothers in the areas of maternity leave, breastfeeding, job security and part-time employ- ment under the 1992 Labour Code.7 Yet, it was only at the end of the third par- liamentary term (1988–92) that the bill for childcare in women’s workplaces (largely public sector) was passed. However, while these rights are clearly observable in policy documents, they are seldom enjoyed in practice. Besides, they focus solely on mothers’ rights and responsibilities. The right to paternity leave, for example, is not in place for fathers to take care of their children, despite the rhetoric about sharing parental obligations. More generally, there is no sign of policies or regulations that encourage fathers to help women take care of chil- dren. As the survey found, whilst mothers preferred to look after their children themselves, the second option they usually chose was “asking the husband to look after their children” – a difficult solution in the absence of clear and re- sourced policies.
Yet parental leave could provide a mechanism for improving welfare for children, as could appropriate working time policies: “responsibility lies on the shoulders of governments whose policies regarding equal opportunities for men and women and the promotion of leave schemes can impact upon organiza- tional culture and public opinion” (Vandeweyer and Glorieux, 2008, p. 275). However, research on developed countries suggests that solutions such as part- time work may not be appropriate for all working women because they are not a homogenous group (Cox and Cox, 1988; but see also Sundström, 1991), or that it will reinforce the traditional gender division of work until such time as high percentages of men begin to use this option (Hein, 2005).
Concluding remarks Most national welfare systems feature three main care-policy components, namely: subsidized day care services, cash benefits for care, and paid parental leave. The question is whether such propositions are relevant to Iran. The cen- sus of 2006 showed that 42.3 per cent of economically active women were unmarried, and over half were married. In other words, the majority of working women have family responsibilities – either exclusive or central responsibility for the functions of the family, such as the socialization of children, parenting,
6 Similar wording appears in paragraph 10 of the Principles of Women’s Employment Policies (see Women’s Socio-Cultural Council, 2005).
7 In particular, Article 78 of the Labour Code of the Islamic Republic of Iran provides as fol- lows: “In workplaces employing women workers, nursing mothers shall be granted a half-hour break every three hours to enable them to nurse their children until they reach two years of age; such breaks shall be regarded as part of their hours of work. Furthermore, employers shall set up childcare centres (such as day nurseries or kindergartens) according to the number of children with due regard to their age.”
Gender and reconciliation of work and family in Iran 415
domestic chores and family entertainment. Indeed, family responsibilities are a salient part of their lives regardless of education and economic status – as con- firmed by the survey underpinning this study – thus creating a situation that makes them very vulnerable as workers.
Yet, as women have come to contribute more to household income, there is some evidence of changing gender norms regarding their participation in the labour market. Although there is less evidence of changing gender norms inside the family, change is possible in this respect too. According to the Civil Code of Iran, “maintenance of children is both the right and the duty of the parents” (Article 1168) – so entitlement to paternal leave could easily be justified.8 In addition, paragraph 37 of the Charter of Women’s Rights and Responsibilities (in the section entitled “Girls’ rights and responsibilities in the family”) empha- sizes the “right to enjoy protection and participation of the spouse in child upbringing”. Therefore, since Iran’s laws and regulations are held to be in con- formity with Islamic doctrine and Sharia law, it seems that its regulators could amend the country’s labour law in such a way that it generally promotes freer choice. It is not, however, simply a question of law. Blossfeld and Drobnic (2001) argue that a father’s involvement in childcare tends to increase as chil- dren grow older and that it improves children’s well-being9 – a valid consid- eration in the context of Iran’s stated policy aim of improving the quality of children’s lives. Besides, flexible leave arrangements generally encourage female workers to remain in the labour force, while a statutory entitlement to parental leave can reduce the negative effect of maternity leave, which often adversely influences employers’ attitudes towards recruiting women.
The survey findings reported in this paper suggest that to achieve the “ideal of care” which mothers want, it is necessary to introduce the “ideal of work” for mothers. On this point, policy-makers interviewed in the course of the survey suggested reduced hours of work with full pay and benefits. However, any such work–family policies in Iran will tend to focus on women working in the public sector, thereby excluding the 59.7 per cent of working women who are employed or self-employed in the private sector (according to the 2006 census).
Many scholars believe that good-quality and affordable childcare services are still the most effective mechanism for supporting mothers/parents in their right to work (e.g. Lister, 2003; Lister et al., 2007; Ellingsaeter, 2006). This point could usefully be taken into consideration by Iran’s policy-makers, who need to think about comprehensive and holistic approaches which include both working time regulation and childcare facilities. National childcare policies in the welfare system of Iran should indeed provide more social facilities comprising both for- mal and informal care arrangements in order to facilitate reconciliation of work and childcare.
8 For the full text of the Civil Code in English, see http://www.alaviandassociates.com/docu ments/civilcode.pdf.
9 See also Pailhé and Solaz (2008). In their study of Swedish fathers, Sundström and Du- vander (2002) also found that fathers tend to take more parental leave if the mother is more educated.
416 International Labour Review
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