Women in Iran: education and labor economics

An extensive body of literature highlights the importance of education and socioeconomic factors on fertility behavior and female labor force participation. Iran was the first part of the developing world to experience a significant decrease in fertility, and fertility in the region remains less than that in Asia and middle-income countries. Similarly, women’s educational attainment, which is known to have an impact on fertility via multiple channels, appears to be higher in the region. Several studies document the importance of increasing women’s education as a key factor contributing to the increase in female labor force participation in developing countries. This dissertation aims to examine the influences of educational attainment and socioeconomic factors on Iranian women’s fertility decisions and their participation in the labor force.

In the first chapter, I estimate the effect of Iranian women’s education on fertility outcomes based on the Iran Statistics Center household censuses from 1996, 2006, 2011, and 2016. During the last four decades, Iran has experienced one of the most dramatic fertility declines in the world. In order to identify the effects of maternal education, I constructed a new data set that considered the number of elementary and secondary schools each year in each region of the country and used this number of elementary and secondary schools at age 7 and 12 as a measure of maternal education. In addition to the impact of opening new schools on the decision to pursue further education, it should also directly influence fertility behaviors through the educational system. As a result of my examination of the mechanisms through which education influences Iranian fertility decisions, the declines in births are only weakly correlated with the increases in women’s labor force participation, as this rate has remained stable between 15 to 19%. I found that education has a negative effect on the population of children in both urban and rural areas of Iran. The number of families with no children and those with only one child in Iran’s urban and rural areas also increased with more years of education. Most studies have concentrated on the return on investment from education in terms of female employment and earnings. In contrast, higher education yields several benefits not reflected in the wages earned by educated women. Furthermore, policymakers and educators must understand and estimate the effect of education on human capital to Evaluate and examine investments in education in middle-income and developing countries. Accordingly, my findings indicate that estimations of the returns of women’s education should also consider their social and demographic characteristics.

In Chapter 2, I examine the effects of education and fertility on female labor force participation (FLFP) in Iran through the utilization of a large sample of repeated cross-sectional data from three censuses (1995, 2005, and 2011). To explain the endogeneity of these variables, I used the number of universities within the cities where the women reside as an instrumental variable for education and the preference for male children as an instrumental variable for fertility. My research shows a positive relationship between higher education and female participation in the labor force in Iran. I conducted separate studies among Iranian women in the north and south of the country owing to their geographical differences. As a result of my empirical analysis, an Iranian’s FLFP increased by 29 percent in the northern region and 27 percent in the southern part with each additional year of tertiary education. I noticed, however, that the correlation between the FLFP and fertility in Iran is much weaker when comparing the effect of higher education. Based on the variable ‘child live’ as the fertility rate for the last two censuses, I find a significant negative correlation between fertility and FLFP. My research indicates an increase in the number of women who worked in family businesses between 1986 and 2005 compared to the 2011 census. In addition, in recent years, women have begun to seek out occupations with attractive job titles and that have modern-style job functions, such as industrial sectors, to escape from their traditional lifestyles.

The third chapter in this thesis examines the wage disparities and gender discrimination in Iran using micro-level data from the Iranian statistical center’s Household Income and Expenditure Surveys between 1994 and 2019 for the purpose of quantifying the gender wage gap. According to my research, the extent and trends in the gender wage gap in Iran varies considerably among women, is primarily influenced by marital status, having children at home, occupations, industries, and levels of education.