2016 Reduced Working-Hours Law for Working Mothers — A Documented Policy Backfire

In July 2016, Iran enacted a law reducing the standard 44-hour work week to 36 hours, with full pay, for mothers of young children and female heads of household — intended as a family-friendly protection to support working mothers.
Human Rights Watch's 2017 investigation, based on 44 interviews and official Iranian labour statistics, found female labour-force participation of just 14.9% (March 2016–March 2017) against 64.1% for men, with female unemployment at 20.7% — double the male rate — despite women making up over half of university graduates but only 17% of the workforce. A May 2015 public-sector hiring exam restricted more than 80% of positions to men (46% in a later exam of 2,545 positions), and Iran's Social Security Organization reported that around 47,000 of 145,000 women (roughly one-third) who took legal maternity leave were subsequently terminated by their employers. World Bank data show female labour-force participation falling further, from 19% in 2016 to 13.4% in 2024 (a different data series, but directionally consistent).
A peer-reviewed study (Chen & Ebadi, Journal of Development Economics, building on a World Bank working paper) found the 2016 reform reduced actual weekly hours by only about 34 minutes on average, while causing employers to reduce hiring and retention of the eligible women it was meant to protect — regulating hours (the intensive margin) without addressing hiring and firing incentives (the extensive margin) worsened outcomes for the targeted group.
Iran-related labour statistics are politically contested, and government-sourced figures — even when relayed by independent bodies such as HRW — should be treated with appropriate caution. The peer-reviewed academic study is the most methodologically rigorous evidence in this case and is weighted most heavily; this entry is included as a cautionary case of a well-intentioned protection law backfiring, not as a model practice.

Read the full analysis: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/088691025d1a39441a199d8ea31e1d1a-0280032023/original/Female-labor-reform-Iran.pdf