Woman in Development and Politics
Year:2007 | Volume:5 | Issue:2|Papers Count:7

International experiences reveal that promotion of gender equality paves the way for developmental achievements in a way that it ensures equal living standards and human rights for all individuals. Nowadays gender equality is not only one of the principles of human rights but is emphasized for alleviating poverty, upgrading living standards and stabilizing economy.The relation between democracy, development and equality is taken for granted thus to realize this it is necessary to conduct structural reformations for increasing women’s participation in political and social life. No doubt supporting women’s role and reinforcing it in the society improves hygiene and health care, enhances level of education, voluntarily controls population growth and generally improves economic growth and equal distribution of benefits.During the past decades there have been fundamental changes in the role and status of women. Many countries have come to an agreement and reached a consensus on the reduction of gender gap regarding education, healthcare, occupation, and social welfare. Data regarding Iran suggest that although there have been effective attempts in reducing gender gap but still women face many problems. Some of these problems and obstacles are due to pressures and forces of development but a great part of it is related to culture and dominating traditions.The third five-year development plan is distinguished from other plans in terms of emphasizing on indices and necessities of reducing gender gaps. This study demonstrates that from many aspects there are fewer gaps and gender inequality in many provinces nevertheless this is totally different regarding occupation.

Image of woman in literature is an important issue of Critical Feminism. It can be argued that literature is the society's mirror, but unfortunately this mirror has not yet reflected a beautiful image of woman. With some exceptions women are usually given a nasty and negative image.This paper is a study on the images of women in some anecdotes and stories that had been written between 6th and 10th century after migration (Hijrat). Some of these stories have Indian origin such as ‘Tooti Nameh’, ‘Sindbad Nameh’, Kalila and Demnah’, ‘Javameol Hekayat’, and some have Persian origin including ‘Samak Ayyar’, ‘Bakhtiar Nameh’, ‘Marzban Nameh’, ‘Golistan’, ‘Baherestan’, and ‘Latayefol Tavayef’.Misogyny and patriarchy are evident in Indian religions especially Hindu. In some of Indian customs such as Sati women are considered at the lowest level of society and they suffer a lot. Therefore in some Persian anecdotes adopted from Indian stories, one can find traces of misogyny.In Persian Stories with Iranian origin, there is no sign of misogyny, but the approach to these texts is masculine. In stories such as ‘Bakhtiar Nameh’, ‘Samak Ayyar’, ‘Golistan’, ‘Baharistan’, and ‘Latayefol Tavayef’ women are considered as the second sex and those who are pious and obedient are praised.

Making decision has become one of the most challenging responsibilities of managers in recent decades. Finding the optimum solution for multiple criteria decision making problems is complicated. Notably, Multiplicity of decision making indices accompanied by variability in quantitative and qualitative measures aggregates the complexity of decisions. Operations research (OR) and multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques have enabled industrial engineers and managers to deal with such problems more easily. Although spouse selection can be defined as an important multiple criteria decision problem, an applicable decision model have not been developed in this field yet. In this paper we propose an aggregated algorithm using UTA1 and Permutation2 in order to develop a DSS (decision support system) which supports user in the process of selecting the most appropriate spouse. This system is simple to use and does not require any special expertise or computation.

This article aims to analyze the imposed war between Iran and Iraq from a new standpoint. Here, we look at the war from the viewpoint of women who were involved in the war as nurses, doctors, or reporters and etc. They lost their homes and families, or even got armed and battled against enemy.Their experiences are categorized into six concepts including dis-embedding, explosion in family structure, changing in the female self, suspension and re-embedding in everyday life. The research analyzes eighteen memoirs, and believes that female experience of war is something unique and considerable which has not been mentioned before.

Many poets have dealt with and referred to the subject of woman. Their attitude towards woman is affected by public perspective and their personal experiences. Having looked at descriptions related to relationship of man and woman in Ahmad Shamloo's and Nezami Ganjavi's poetry, this paper attempts to introduce two different and general views on woman role and characteristics.Although Nezami attempted to free woman from her down graded status in the society of that time, he failed to surpass the common discourse surroundings dominating his time, and despite his pure and glittering descriptions of woman, the woman in his poetry possesses hegemonic qualities which shows her inner weakness. In this poetry Romantic relationship (affairs) is formed on superficial beauties of lover and beloved as well as their affection and infatuation to a unique face and figure.In contrast, although the woman of Shamloo's poetry possesses no salient features, but has a big spirit, which prioritizes her over other women while being in outmost anonymity. She is not the conqueror of the world with her ire and coyness, but she conquers human entity with her humbleness and humanity. Here, romantic relation is not the consequence of a sensational desire to attain a beauty myth, but is a product of empathy and integration of two ordinary humans with big spirits.Nezami's Khosro Shirin and poetry collection of Ahmad Shamloo have also been studied and notion of woman has been analyzed. Other documents which have referred to this subject are used in the research process.

TVS have been established with different objectives, namely to prepare the grounds for guiding the students towards employment or providing opportunity for continuing their studies. However poor quality of schools, lack of required capacities in society, and various gender inequalities in labor market have been serious obstacles in fulfilling the above objectives and thus have reinforced the conception that school outputs are undesirable.Aimed at studying this mentality scientifically, the present research evaluates the outputs of girls’ TVS in Tehran in 3 stages."Pre-evaluation" stage consisted of surveying 236 experts, 7 factors, 45 indicators in "personal, social and economical" dimensions and compiling 16 judgment criteria in "desirable, fairly desirable and undesirable" levels.In "evaluation" stage, compiled factors and indicators, along with 3 questionnaires administrated to 226 participants including principals, graduates, and employers of employed graduates were used.Results showed that in personal dimension, quality of "achievement and dropout" and "alumni (knowledge, attitude, creativity, and skills)" were "fairly desirable" and "promotion to higher education " was "undesirable".In social dimension, quality of "fulfillment of educational-social goal" was "fairly desirable". In economical dimension, quality of "employment" and "entrepreneurship" was "undesirable" and "employer satisfaction" was "fairly desirable". Both of personal and economical dimensions were evaluated as "undesirable" and social dimension evaluated as "fairly desirable". Finally, quality of girl’s TVS in Tehran was evaluated as "undesirable".In "post-evaluation" stage, using the results of content analysis of open ended questionnaires of graduates and employers, matched with interviewing students, teachers and school counselors, the reasons of evaluation results were discussed and recommendations for improvement of present situation were suggested.

Contemporary Iranian society is transiting from traditional outlook to modern attitudes. Social chaos matched with behavioral and thinking chaos is characteristic of transition period. Political structure, as a part of society, alongside the juridical, economic and social structure is transiting from traditional sovereignty to intellectual and legal one. Political participation, as a tangible aspect of social participation, has similar fate in transiting societies with anomalous characteristic. Nevertheless, women do not have a proper status in political participation and are judged as an incomplete political entity.The research, through tracing roots of women's social suffering, believes that for reasons arising from ancient social and economic notions, women have been removed from social interaction network thus they are faced with many obstacles and difficulties on attaining high levels of political/ social power. Therefore, equal opportunities and options should be created for women to enter the network of society's mutual relations so that in this way the stereotype of male domination and women's subordination is eliminated.