As female students head back to universities in the U.S. and elsewhere this time of year, Iranian officials are actively working to limit the number of females pursuing a BA or BS in their country. In what The Telegraph has described as an “officially-approved act of sex-discrimination,” female students have been barred from “more than 70 university degree courses” in Iran.
In other words, the nation that still has laws for stoning adulterers on the books, which hangs practicing homosexuals from the gallows, and which maintains “morality police” to enforce skirt length, head coverings, etc., for females, has now decided there’s no need for women to pursue higher education in a significant number of disciplines.
The outrage from the West and from Iranian women is palpable. With Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi leading the outcry against the new rules by “demanding a UN investigation.”
Supporters of the law, senior Iranian clerics among them, believe female access to higher education has resulted in “declining birth and marriage rates.” And these are things they simply will not tolerate.