The US military said on Monday it has redirected seven commercial vessels and disabled one since the renewed US naval blockade of Iranian ports came into effect on July 14.
Zahra Behrouz-Azar said women account for more than 64% of applicants seeking university admission and more than 52% of the country’s university students.
However, she said the overall figures conceal a pronounced gender divide between academic disciplines.
Speaking at the unveiling of Iran’s annual statistical report on women, she said the gap is quite wide in technical and engineering subjects, where approximately 573,000 men graduated, compared with about 180,000 women, during the latest year covered by the report.
The imbalance reflects a wider international pattern. Women account for around 35% of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics worldwide, a proportion that UNESCO says has remained largely unchanged for a decade.
Behrouz Azar said, however, that Iran’s gender gap appeared more pronounced and required closer research into the cultural, social and institutional forces shaping students’ choices.
“Which beliefs and cultural and social factors cause girls to gravitate less toward fields such as electrical engineering, computer science and some other technical disciplines?” she asked.
Behrouz-Azar said the disparity was particularly striking because Iranian women had established a strong presence in content production, the digital economy and freelance work, but were less likely to enter programming, coding and specialist areas of artificial intelligence.
She warned against the assumption that some disciplines were inherently “male” or that women did not need to enter them. Her office had raised the matter with the science minister and requested a detailed review of university admission procedures and other factors contributing to the disparity, she said.
The vice president did not allege that formal admissions rules explicitly excluded women from those subjects. She instead called on academics and researchers to examine the “hidden layers” behind the statistics, including whether social attitudes, education and career expectations discourage girls from pursuing technical fields.
Behrouz-Azar also linked women’s representation in technology to the development of artificial intelligence, saying researchers in AI ethics had argued that greater participation by women could contribute to systems that placed more emphasis on ethics and care.
Iran’s expansion of women’s access to university has not produced comparable participation in the labor market. World Bank data put the female labor-force participation rate at about 14% in 2025, while an International Labor Organization assessment reported a large and persistent divide between women and men in access to paid work.
That reflects not only personal choice but also decades of bureaucratic and social barriers limiting women's employment.
That disconnect means many highly educated Iranian women remain outside formal employment even as they make up a majority of the university population. International labor bodies have previously pointed to restrictions on women’s access to formal employment despite major advances in education.
