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

In July 2016, Iran enacted a law reducing the standard 44-hour working week to 36 hours, on full pay, for mothers of young children and female heads of household, intended as a family-friendly protection for working mothers. It was introduced against a backdrop of stark gender gaps in Iran's labour market — women make up over half of university graduates but only around 17% of the workforce, and a May 2015 public-sector hiring exam restricted more than 80% of positions to men.

The reform's stated aim was to protect and support working mothers and female heads of household by reducing their working hours without loss of pay.

Human Rights Watch's 2017 investigation, based on 44 interviews and official Iranian labour statistics, found female labour-force participation of just 14.9% (versus 64.1% for men) in the year after the law, with female unemployment at 20.7% — double the male rate. 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, and World Bank data show female labour-force participation falling further, from 19% in 2016 to 13.4% in 2024. A peer-reviewed study (Chen & Ebadi, Journal of Development Economics, building on a World Bank working paper) found the reform reduced actual weekly hours by only about 34 minutes on average, while causing employers to reduce hiring and retention of the very women it was meant to protect.

Regulating hours without addressing hiring and firing incentives appears to have worsened outcomes for the targeted group — a documented policy backfire. Iran-related labour statistics are politically contested and government-sourced figures should be treated with appropriate caution; the peer-reviewed academic study is weighted as the most methodologically rigorous evidence, and this entry is included as a cautionary case rather than a model practice.