Gender differences in the professional experiences of Iran specialists in American academia

Abstract

The work on gender differences in academic life spans a wide array of colleges and universities, scholarly disciplines, and countries. Using a survey conducted in 2016 to capture “the state of the field” in Iranian Studies as US–Iran relations were in a brief thaw, this paper draws on some of these perspectives and explores gender differences in the professional experiences of Iranian Studies scholars working in the USA. Iranian Studies has grown and diversified in the USA since the 1960s. This expansion occurred despite disruptions in Iran itself and in US–Iranian relations since 1979, with many US-based Iran specialists having heritage connections to Iran. The survey, which is the first of its kind conducted among this particular academic community, covered a range of topics related to respondents’ academic and professional experiences, career outlook, and political activities. The results spotlight some notable differences—statistically significant differences in several cases—in the professional experiences of men and women in this academic field. Women respondents were more likely to be of junior rank or graduate students and were more likely than men to feel that gender identity influenced their professional milestones. Women were more likely to list the desire for social impact as a professional motivation than men. Women tended to feel less sanguine about the state of their careers, their professional environment, their career prospects, and the state of the Iranian Studies field as a whole. Some of these attitudes varied depending on their self-identification as Iranian, Iranian-American or American, while some held true across self-identification. These results mostly confirmed expectations based on similar research discussed in our literature review.