Abstract:
The number of women with professional degrees, occupying high-end jobs and positions has been increasing all over the world. The fact that the number of Iranian women in universities and colleges in the country has been increasing steadily during the past 10 years and more than 60% of all those admitted to the universities and colleges in Iran are women, has caused noticeable increase in labor force participation and professional and high end jobs and positions for Iranian women. This is basically due to cultural, legal and structural obstacles towards women’s employment in Iran, which in turn leads to self fulfilling prophecy of negative outcome in their cost benefit analysis of time, energy and resources spent. This, in turn, debilitates and discourages them to get involved in professional arenas. A national representative sample of 908 university educated Iranian women responded to questions about their experience after their graduation. The results showed a self fulfilling prophecy at work that led them to believe that the time, energy and costs involved were not compensated and they didn’t think that getting a higher professional degree had been a profitable investment for them.
Machine summary:
Cost Benefit Analysis of Higher Education by Educated Women in Iran: The Tale of Self Fulfilling Prophecy and Low Labor Force Participation Mahmoud Ghazi Tabatabaii 1 Association Professor of Demography, University of Tehran, Iran Zeinab Karimi PhD Student, University of Helsinki, Finland Received March 2010 Accepted May 2010 The number of women with professional degrees, occupying high-end jobs and positions has been increasing all over the world.
How do the Iranian educated women deal with this apparent inconstancy between their success in achieving ever increasing higher levels of education and professional degrees and the chronic low labor force participation and low economic activity rate.
Table 1- Percentage of Female University Students in Bachelor and Postgraduate / Source: Ministry of Science, Research and Technology; 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006 As it is evident from Table 1, the Percentage of women to men in all fields of study has been increasing steadily since 1987.
Foroutan (2009) also refers to conditions such as high illiteracy and low education level of women and more importantly, an exceptionally high level of fertility in Islamic nations as crucial and main obstacles to women’s employment participation.
Considering what was said about the educational achievements of women in Iran coupled with dramatic decrease in fertility rate and marriage age-rate increase during recent decades, neither the Islamic context explanation, put forward by Foroutan (2009), nor Hakim’s rational choice explanation alone can sufficiently explain the apparent gap between Iranian women’s education and employment status.