Veiled Employment: Islamism and the Political Economy of Women’s Employment in Iran

1. Gender and Globalization: The Iranian Experience

25 Gender and Globalization The Iranian Experience Jennifer C. Olmsted The ways globalization has reshaped employment patterns and its implications for gender relations have been the subject of a number of studies. Few studies, though, have looked explicitly at this question for Iran. In this chapter I examine women’s employment in Iran within the context of globalization. Iran provides an interesting example of how both internal and external economic policies can shape socioeconomic outcomes and the ways such policies can gender employment outcomes. Insights can be gained not only about the situation in Iran, but also more generally about the process of globalization and how diverse that experience has been. In the case of Iran, one obvious question concerns how Iran has experienced globalization since the establishment of the Islamic Republic. What has that meant both in terms of the economic decisions that individuals and the government have made since the 1979 Revolution, and in terms of how other nations have responded to Iran? Certainly, in recent years fierce debates have taken place within Iran about what level of openness is appropriate for the economy. In addition, Iran has experienced various population shifts, with members of the educated elite leaving the country, while at the same time the country has had to absorb a fairly large Afghan refugee population . And last but certainly not least, since the 1979 Revolution the United States has punished Iran through a policy of economic 26 • Veiled Employment isolation. All of these factors are part of Iran’s globalization experience and suggest ways that both external and internal policy decisions have played a role in shaping employment outcomes in Iran. These policies may not only have a differential impact by sex, but also by class. It is also important to ask in what ways the Iranian experience is unique and/or typical, by comparing it to that of other countries in the region. (Economic) Globalization The term globalization is generally used to describe various technological and policy changes that have caused the world to “shrink.”1 The economic factors that are generally stressed in discussions of globalization are increases in the exchange of goods (and more recently shifts in the location of service production), greater capital mobility and increased human mobility.2 Much of the globalization literature has focused on countries that went through a debt crisis and on the ways that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) became involved in pushing those countries to open up to international trade and foreign capital investments, a process that is generally referred to as structural adjustment. (See for example Stiglitz 2003 and Buckman 2004.) In discussing the concept of globalization, though, it is important to emphasize the diversity of globalization experiences, and the fact that just as the international community has pushed some countries to open up, in other cases external powers, particularly the United States, have pushed to economically isolate countries. The case of Iran is particularly complex, 1. A growing literature that examines various cultural and political changes that have occurred as a result of intensified globalization has also emerged, but the focus in this chapter will be on the link between economics, gender, and globalization in the context of Iran. 2. For a more general discussion of economic globalization in the context of Iran, see Esfahani and Pesaran (2009). Gender and Globalization • 27 because within Iran fierce debates have taken place concerning the level of economic openness (Bahramitash 2004; Marossi 2006), but at the same time, it is also among those countries upon which the United States has imposed sanctions. As such, the Iranian case provides an example of how complex the relationship between a nation and the global economy can be, and the reasons why the term globalization needs to be carefully defined. In addition to the general literature on globalization, a growing body of work also exists that examines how men’s and women’s economic experiences have differed during this era of increased globalization . Given that structural adjustment policies often involved reduced government spending and trade barriers, the two literatures are often intertwined. In the case of MENA, the World Bank and the IMF have long been advocating for reductions in the size of government . Feminists have expressed concerns about what impact this reduction might have. For example, in Egypt, Mervat Hatem speculated early in Egypt’s structural adjustment period that the public sector would...