The Gendered Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on the Iranian Labor Market

Despite sizable government interventions to sustain the economy, in the first year of the pandemic (2021/22), approximately 1 million jobs were lost in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and labor force participation contracted by 3 percentage points. Iranian women were the most affected: two out of three jobs lost between 2019/20 and 2020/21 were previously held by women. The gendered impact of the crisis contributed to widening Iranian women’s disadvantage in the labor market. Most importantly, the gains in female labor force participation that had slowly accumulated since 2011 vanished. Consistent with what is observed in other countries, women with young children were the most affected by the crisis. The combined effect of school closures and unequal intra-household allocation of care responsibilities, associated with prevailing gender norms, pushed Iranian women with children out of the labor force. Whether or not these trends will be reversed as the management of the COVID-19 pandemic is normalized and the economy recovers from the crisis remains an important policy question.