Exploring the role of female egalitarian values in the 2022 protests in Iran, using data from the World Values Survey

ABSTRACT

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 there have been intermittent protests against the ruling regime over civil rights issues, with the 2022 protests often regarded as the most significant challenge to the status quo so far. These protests were perceived as being led by young women. For the first time, this study uses survey data to analyze why that should be. It investigates the evolving values of women in Iran with respect to gender equality, the impact of increased levels of female education and the adoption of new technologies that changed the way they socialized, to explain why young women led the protests. Using data from the World Values Surveys in Iran (in 2005 and 2020), and existing literature, it places this social conflict into the context of recent cultural changes in Iran. Specifically, it analyses data on the differing values and opinions of various segments of the population, by age and gender, and how they changed over time, to explore the influences that led to the protests and provide historical context as to why they occurred when they did.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender equality
• protests
• women
• Iran

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comprehensive comments received from Professor Steffen Kuehnel when revising this article. I would also like to thank Professor Peter Schmidt for his feedback on an earlier draft. I am also grateful for the feedback from Dana and Diana. My special thanks go to Marion whose support while I was doing this research made this paper possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Many videos rapidly emerged online showing the young women leading the protests, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/oct/04/students-join-anti-government-protests-in-schools-across-iran-video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfy8q-xNbAU, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n78ow4GPVi8, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kz_yKj9X9E, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63143504, https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/oct/04/iranian-schoolgirls-appear-to-throw-bottles-and-chase-education-official-in-protest-video.

2 In this paper, ‘the Revolution’ is used to refer to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

3 The phrase ‘lost generation’ dates back to the 1920s and is sometimes used as a slang term by this generation in Iran to describe themselves, together with the term ‘burned generation’.

4 https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org

5 The Wave 6 survey was not carried out in Iran.

6 The sampling methodology described is for Wave 7 but the sampling design for Wave 5 was very similar. Full details for both are available on https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org.

7 In the figures and tables, the phrases ‘Political Leaders’. ‘University’ and ‘Business Executives’ refer to these statements

8 The International Standard Classification of education levels are defined in UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2011).

9 The outlier low Egalitarian Score for respondents born in the 1960s with mothers attaining higher education is due to a sample size of one (it is zero for those born in the 1950s or 1970s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Parhizkari

Sara Parhizkari gained her Masters in Quantitative Analysis in the Social Sciences at the Catholic University in Brussels before joining the Center of Methods in Social Science at the University of Goettingen. Her research interests are gender issues in Muslim majority countries and the effect of religiosity on gender equality. She is now completing her PhD in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Georg-August-University, Goettingen.