This article intends to give a comprehensive picture of women's participation in the scientific field in Iran in the last four decades, among students and members of academia. One major fact is that despite the legal and cultural impediments the proportion of young women in the universities has risen above 50 percent. Another is that this increase has occurred much more at the undergraduate level than at the graduate and post-graduate levels. In the academic world, women are still far outnumbered by men, particularly at the higher levels of the hierarchy. We intend to show how the discrepancies are structured between the undergraduate and the graduate levels on the one hand, and between the lower and higher levels of academic hierarchy on the other, and propose an interpretation of these two major tendencies.
In this paper, we discuss the impact of Jürgen Habermas' ideas on Iranian intellectuals who live in Iran. The upshot of the paper is that in present day Iran, where the society is going through a significant transitional period, various intellectual groups have reacted differently towards the ideas of the German philosopher-sociologist. While the orthodox left-wing (ex-Marxist) intellectuals and the conservative right-wing writers have, by and large, tended to ignore his views, a younger generation of the left-wing intellectuals and a number of the Muslim intellectuals with left-wing/socialist tendencies, have tried, each in their own ways, to 'adopt' Habermas' ideas in pursuit of their own projects/research programs.
This article attempts to explore the concept of scientific community at the macro-national level in the context of Iran. Institutionalisation of science and its professional growth has been constrained by several factors. The article first conceptualises the notion of science community as found in the literature in the context of Iran, and attempts to map through some indicators. The main focus, however, lies in mapping some institutional problems through empirical research. This was undertaken in 2002–04 in order to analyse the structure of the scientific community in Iran in the 'exact sciences' (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences). The empirical work was done in two complementary perspectives: through a questionnaire and statistical analysis of it, and through semi-structured interviews with the researchers. There are number of problems confronting scientists in Iran. Facilities provided by institutions is one of the major problems of research. Another is the tenuous cooperation among scientists. This is reported by most of the researchers, who deplore the lack of cooperation among their group. Relationships are mostly with the Ph.D. students and only marginally with colleagues. Our research shows that the more brilliant the scientists, the more frustrated they are from scientific institutions in Iran. Medium-range researchers seem to be much happier about the scientific institution to which they belong than the brighter scholars. The scientific institutions in Iran seem to be built for the needs of the former rather than the latter. These institutions seem not to play a positive role in the case of the best scientists. On the whole, many ingredients of the scientific community, at least at its inception, are present among Iranian scientists: the strong desire for scientific achievement in spite of personal, institutional and economic problems.
