Abstract
This article addresses women's contemporary position in academia in Iran. By systematically reviewing available academic and official databases on women's positions in academia published online or in print, the question is raised if women's current position and role in academia is the result of personal choice making or an existent systematic discriminatory social structure. To address this issue, available Iranian research and data on female recruitment in universities are analyzed. The results show that there is a general accordance on two findings in the research addressing women's position in academia. First, gender discrimination is restricting women's choices by systematically excluding them from educational, managerial and administrative positions. Second, in spite of the substantial increase in women's enrolment in tertiary education, significant development in women's position and role in scientific and educational institutions has not taken place. After discussing the data, I will try to compare two sets of sociological theoretical approaches that offer explanations for women's lower levels of participation in the academia; namely, theories of exclusion and theories of participation. I suggest that the former is more effective in analyzing women's position in Iranian academia, because of being based on recognition of the existing structural discriminations. Although women's participation in higher education is gradually growing and gender boundaries are being stretched on a daily basis, there is need for fundamental structural changes in social and educational spheres, and widespread implementation of positive discrimination.
Highlights
Women have been excluded from the academia and scientific production due to their gender in many societies worldwide
In the beginning of this article the main question of the paper was defined as 'are women’s position and role in academia a result of their low individual participation or an existent discrimination?’ To respond to the question, based on the existing data presented in the previous sections, I discuss two sets of possible theoretical frameworks suggested by Janalizade, Moghimi and Amini [14]
First category studies women's participation in knowledge production and its socio-cultural consequences; this group adopts an individualistic approach to participation which leads to considering women free agents who make choices that result in their lower participation in the academia; while, the second category, exclusion approach, which consists of a smaller portion of literature focuses on unequal shares and gender discrimination and exclusion of women from scientific institutions
Summary
Women have been excluded from the academia and scientific production due to their gender in many societies worldwide. Women's current situation in academia is a result of dominant patriarchal social, cultural and political structures that have systematically excluded them from knowledge production and education. The existence of gender-based public-private sphere binary segregation has long made women's status unstable in many social public roles and careers including academic ones. The history of educational roles shows that women have been a small minority in educating adults until the 20th century, while as Tamboukou [32] explains, teaching children has long been considered to be in the middle of public-private continuum and more appropriate for women. Women's role in educating young children is linked to their ‘natural’ role as mothers [32]
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