Iran's Wars — Foreign and Domestic — Are Destroying Women
When a 29-year-old woman in Tehran was laid off last October — her employer shuttered after a sudden liquidity crisis following the June 2025 war with Israel — she did what Iran's economy had left her no choice but to do. She had a university degree. She had applied to dozens of positions. The law allows her husband to bar her from certain jobs. There were no jobs to take. What happened next, she does not speak about openly. She is one of millions.
Iran is in free fall. By late 2025, official inflation had surpassed 48 percent — with food prices up 72 percent year-on-year. The rial had collapsed to more than one million to the dollar on street markets. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported that 41 percent of Iranians suffer from moderate or severe food insecurity. Unofficial estimates by Iran's own economists suggest up to 70 percent of the population lives below the relative poverty line. Then, on February 28, 2026, American and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, shattered critical infrastructure, and drove Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz — triggering the world's largest oil supply disruption since the 1970s. A country already on its knees was driven further into the rubble.
Women are paying the most devastating price. Iran's female labor force participation rate stands at 13 percent — third-lowest in the world, behind only Afghanistan and Iraq, and less than a third of the global average of 49 percent. The cruelest irony: 71 percent of Iran's unemployed women hold university degrees. The Islamic Republic has engineered a system in which women are educated enough to understand their own subjugation but systematically blocked from escaping it. Husbands can legally prohibit wives from working. The new Hijab and Chastity Law — 71 articles of surveillance and punishment, backed by facial-recognition AI under the so-called "Noor Plan" — ensures that women who resist can be denied social services, fined, or imprisoned.
Into this void, desperation flows. Estimates from 2017 placed the number of sex workers in Iran at 228,700 — widely considered an undercount, and predating the current cascade of crises. According to the Welfare Organization's AIDS Research Center, 50 percent of Iran's prostitutes are housewives in their twenties. Students, office workers, married women: the profile shatters every stereotype. Prostitution in Iran begins at age 12. Academic research published in December 2024 traces a step-by-step path into sex work driven not by agency but by the gradual exhaustion of every other option. Peer-reviewed studies document the violence that follows: clients who "know they have no backing" beat, rob, and degrade women who have no legal recourse — and who themselves face execution under Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code.
Child marriage is the younger sister of this crisis. Over one million girls were married before the age of 18 in Iran in the eight years through 2024, including 13,500 girls younger than 13. Families in poverty marry daughters off for dowry payments — a transaction between a father's desperation and an older man's demand. Two girls under 18 committed suicide in 2024 rather than comply with forced marriages. Femicide surged 180 percent in a single year: 179 recorded cases in 2024, up from 55 in 2023, according to UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato. Iran's courts, the UN notes, provide "de facto impunity" for honor killings.
The state's response to all of this is to punish the women further. At least 975 people were executed in Iran in 2024 — the highest figure since 2015 — including 31 women. Prostitution is among the offenses that can carry the death penalty. The apparatus of repression — morality police, AI surveillance, a judiciary that treats female poverty as moral failing — operates as a machine for converting economic desperation into criminal exposure.
What is happening in Iran is not a social crisis alongside an economic one. It is a single, unified catastrophe with women at its center: the deliberate destruction of female economic agency by law and policy, compounded by war and sanctions, producing a "feminization of survival" in which the body becomes the only asset left to trade. The international community's silence is not neutrality. It is complicity.
Indicative Sources
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Illustration: Perplexity