ABSTRACT
With every new academic year, the implementation of gender segregation measures at Iranian universities, and the reported restrictions associated with them, arouse something of an international uproar. These measures are often condemned by UN officials, Human Rights lawyers and others as part of a renewed attempt by the Islamic Republic “to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena,” as the Telegraph reported in their article, “Anger as Iran bans women from universities” (2012). In 2012, for example, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland (2012) read a statement calling upon “Iranian authorities to protect women’s rights and to uphold Iran’s own laws and international obligations, which guarantee non-discrimination in all areas of life, including access to education.” In response to these accusations, higher education officials and government-sanctioned news agencies in Iran went on the defensive, denying the existence of gender discrimination and using the trend towards the “feminization” of higher education as evidence of Iran’s promotion of women’s rights and women’s “esteemed” position in the country. The spin from both the Islamic Republic and the international community has been somewhat misleading. Gender segregation measures affect both men and women, and are part of a long-standing scheme, which dates back to the early years of the Islamic Republic and which has been employed by different governments in the service of different goals. In the 1980s, the state sought to physically separate men and women on campus, in keeping with the idea that the mingling of the sexes outside the home was “un-Islamic” and dangerous for public morality. Later, in the 1990s, the state employed gender segregation policies to fix the “gender imbalance” in various undergraduate majors. In the last decade, attempts to “Islamize” the campus anew have been present, but, in what could be labeled as the “masculinity turn” in the discourse of gender segregation (Amar, 2011), the state has used gender 85segregation measures to redress the unexpected consequences of the feminization of higher education in Iran. The recent developments in gender segregation measures are primarily aimed at protecting both the life chances of men—in education, marriage, and the job market—as well as shielding the state from political pressure amidst high unemployment and overall economic malaise. 1 Drawing on media representations of the feminization of higher education and debates about gender segregation, in this chapter, I develop an understanding of the different forms of and the various logics behind gender segregation policies. This historical account demonstrates that the state’s formulation and implementation of gender segregation policies in Iranian universities have been unstable and inconsistent, and that the state has had to repackage gender segregation as a practical solution to societal problems rather than as an instrument of moralization. Scholars of Iranian studies, however, have consistently reduced gender segregation to its Islamic dimension, framing it as part of the state’s effort to Islamize society. The literature remains ambivalent about the effects of such policies on women. For example, Shams (2016) argues that women’s increased access to higher education has occurred because of the state’s segregation policies, while others (see for example Esfandiari, 1997; Rostami-Povey, 2011; Sanasarian, 1982) argue that women have outnumbered men in Iranian universities despite the state’s segregation policies. Despite their disagreement about the effects and implications of gender segregation policies, these scholars agree on one point: both groups see gender segregation as part of the state’s “Islamic” agenda to “purify” and “moralize” academic spaces. While I do not discount the effects of Islamic ideologies on the Iranian state’s gender segregation policies, I contend that an exclusive focus on the religious aspect of these policies overlooks the effects of key sociopolitical developments at the national level. Taking cues from Asef Bayat (2005), I argue that the fresh turn toward gender segregation signals not a “return to religion,” but rather the growing ability of the state to reinvent and institutionalize its policies in the face of societal pressures. Moreover, gender segregation measures are often scrutinized for evidence of a particular Iranian president’s budding “pro-women” or “anti-women” tendencies. Rezai-Rashti and Moghadam (2011) argue, for example, that in the early 1980s, referred to as the “ideological period,” gender segregation policies were adopted by extremists, but under the presidency of Rafsanjani and Khatami (1988–2004), the “liberalization reform period,” these measures were set aside only to be taken up again by “neo-fundamentalists” under the presidency of Ahmadinejad (2005–2013). By examining the processes of policy formation and formulation over the past four decades, I show otherwise; that gender segregation has consistently been on the state’s agenda since 1979 regardless of the government’s ideological underpinnings.
