TEHRAN — The number of women graduating from Iran’s universities is overtaking the number of men, promising a change in the job market and, with it, profound social change. Twenty postgraduate students are sitting in a plush modern classroom listening to a lecture on environmental management at the Islamic Azad University – a private institution with 1.6 million students across Iran. The room is darkened so the students can watch the lecturer’s slide show comparing energy consumption around the world. Three quarters of the students in this class are women – the five men in the class are huddled together in a corner. As Professor Majid Abbaspour explains, this is a far cry from the past: ‘When I was doing my bachelor’s degree in Iran we had a class of 60 in mechanical engineering with only four women. ‘Now the number has changed a lot – I think this may be because the attitudes of families have changed.’ Well over half of university students in Iran are now women. In the applied physics department of Azad University 70% of the graduates are women – a statistic which would make many universities in the […]