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

4. The Transformation of the Female Labor Market

123 4 The Transformation of the Female Labor Market Roksana Bahramitash and Hadi Salehi Esfahani In previous chapters, we covered the social, political, and economic context of prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Iran. In this chapter we will focus on census data and quantitative analysis of this transformation. Much of the previously published work on female employment argues that because of the process of Islamization , women’s employment declined in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution (V. Moghadam 1988, 1995a; F. Moghadam 1994; Moghissi 1996; Afshar 1997; Alizadeh and Harper 2003; Behdad and Nomani 2006). Some academics have argued that Islamization may have in fact facilitated education, mobilization, and participation in public life for women who came from low-income families or religious backgrounds (Paidar 1995; Kian 1997; Hoodfar 1999; Poya 1999; Mehran 2003). Meanwhile, many factors other than Islamization—for example, demographic change, formation of new institutions, and internal and external shocks—have also been at work in complex and dynamic ways, influencing labor market conditions and interacting with the Islamization process. We make an effort in this chapter to sort out these issues to the extent that the census data permit. The census data are available from the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI), www.sci.org.ir, in tabulated form on a decennial basis from 1956 to 2006. We will pay particular attention to the 2006 census 124 • Veiled Employment data, which have become available recently and have not been used in past studies of the female labor market in Iran (e.g., Mehryar, Farjadi , and Tabibian 2004; Behdad and Nomani 2006). Some studies have gone beyond the 1996 census, using Household Expenditure and Income Surveys (HEIS) and Socio-economic Characteristics of Households (SECH) datasets produced by SCI (e.g., Salehi-Isfahani 2005b; Salehi-Isfahani and Marku 2006). However, those surveys are more recent and do not allow comparisons with prerevolution times. Also, the surveys are based on somewhat dated samples that do not match the recent census results. Of course, using census data has its own limitations. In particular, some of women’s labor market activities may have gone unnoted in the process of data collection, especially in the earlier censuses. Also, in the 1976 and 1986 censuses , the seasonally unemployed were categorized as unemployed, whereas they were treated as employed in other censuses. We will try to take account of these shortcomings in our analysis of the census data. The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. We first examine the broad trends and sectoral shifts in the economy and in the female labor market. Then we highlight the role of demographic factors, especially age structure of the population, in the observed pattern of change in the female labor force. In the next section we discuss the educational developments that seem to have played key roles in women ’s labor force participation (LFP). This discussion is followed by a focus on the structure of female employment in terms of occupations and positions. The last section is devoted to the unemployment problem , which is a major concern, particularly for young women in Iran. Women’s LFP and Employment in Iran: Trends and Complexities The Overall Picture During the past five decades, Iran’s ten-years-and-older female labor force has grown more than sixfold, from 0.57 million to 3.62 Transformation of the Female Labor Market • 125 million (see table 4.1). This growth was much faster than the 3.6-fold increase in the male labor force. There is a huge literature on underreporting of women’s participation in the labor force, especially in rural areas (Benaría 1999b), and the problem is likely to have been more serious in earlier decades. However, focusing on urban areas, where undercounting may have been less serious, reveals an even more dramatic picture. The female labor force in urban areas was 0.19 million in 1956 and 2.5 million in 2006, an increase of 13.5 times, compared to the 7.9-fold increase for men. As a result, the share of women in the urban labor force rose from about 10 percent in 1956 to almost 16 percent in 2006 (fig. 4.1). This trend has persisted in recent decades, with a major exception during the 1976– 86 period, when the urban labor force increased by 1.5 times for women and 1.6 times for men, lowering the share of women from 11...