The effects of socio-demographic and cultural factors on married women's employment in Shiraz,Iran

Parastoo Esmaeili, University of Tehran
Ali Hesari

Relative to men and other countries, activity and employment rates for women are low. Despite a partial improvement over the last decade, this rate is still surprisingly low and the fact that the women activity rate has remained nearly unchanged for 40 years requires greater consideration. The importance and necessity of women’s participation in economic activities have not received required emphasis to encourage activity in paid work for many reasons. Our findings shows that there is a significant relationship between women's employment and number of children, in other words those who have more children tend to have less chance of being employed and vice versa. Among more skilled women such as those who are with computer, art activities and familiar with several languages, the probability of employment is higher and have more positive attitude toward employment. Education status tends to decrease the number of children, in other words educated women have less children and also have more motivation and probability for being employed and learning skills. Women, who think that employment brings social prestige such as respect, have more motivation for being employed but religious women do not have positive attitude toward employment. They are not in agreeing with women's employment; therefore their employment rate is less than others. Universe of this study is all women in Shiraz; sample size is 360; 180 employed and 180 unemployed women. This sample is chosen by cluster random sampling. As a result we can conclude that education status has the highest effect on women's employment.