Basically, the whole sexism thing in the Middle East has peaked at a dangerously high level of pig-headedness once again. Iran has officially banned women from studying over 70 BA and BSc degrees in 36 universities. Sucks right? Wait. It gets better. The reason they did this was because women were consistently achieving higher scores, receiving jobs with higher status and pay, stopped getting married and having babies all the time, and just generally moving up in the world. Can't have that now can we?
Of course not! Using 100% of your country's labor and ingenuity would just make too much sense and raise your world standing! (http://forum.phillyd.tv/discussion/4613/women-banned-from-universities-in-iran#latest)
Ok. So what do we do about it?
Well, we could just wait for Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to petition the UN (AKA "The Un") and cross our fingers and eyes and hope for the best. But noooo, that's not what's keeping Sara up. No way. It's because my mind and my consciousness has taken my sleep from me and has it held ransom until I personally figure out a fully-thought out way to solve this problem.
I was told at a seminar that the best way to permanently solve a problem, as opposed to the all-famous ever-failing band-aid solutions, is to ask "Why is this a problem in the 1st place?"
So I ask myself: "What is wrong with women becoming educated?"
And I answer myself: "Well...we stop having babies because we have other things to do with our time besides changing diapers. So we lower slope of the curve of the world population. Solves the over-population crisis. Ok. So that doesn't work..."
And I think some more before I answer: "Well...we earn more money, which also means we'll spend more money, which, as far as I understand the global economic system, means that the global economy will move more smoothly. Ok. so that doesn't work..."
And I think some more before I answer: "Well...as we rise in the world, women start to take up positions with more power, even more power than men, which means that at some moment, there is a hormonal woman making a huge decision....AHA!"
I figured it out. We should not be educated because we bleed from a place that doesn't exist within the male gender.
Ok, so how do we fix this?
Well, technology has come up with awesome hormonal treatments and therapies, but I like the good old-fashioned approach of just having more than one person, male OR female, in some sort of committee/parliamentary/democratic-type setting make a communal decision.
Now, this does not solve the problem at hand, that women are being refused the right to pursue careers and dreams, but it solves the problem that comes after it i.e., what to do with educated women. Now here comes the hard part, how do we educate them?
Obviously women are being denied entrance to attend universities in Iran. So that leaves two choices: re-instate university privileges for all genders in Iran, or get the Iranian ladies the hell out of there. Shirin Ebadi is tackling the 1st option which, in the long-run, will be most efficient, I want to tackle the 2nd option.
I know it's a half-baked, hare-brained idea, but I never said it was good.
I want to fund a scholarship for women in Iran. I want to be able to pay for their student visas, full tuition, room-and-board, books, EVERYTHING they could possibly need to overcome this horrendous setback. I want to start an organization. I want to set-up a charity. I want to do something useful to show these girls, these students just like me who are studying English, physics, engineering that we are not all bigots!!!
Like I said, not very good. But it's a start. If anybody has any experience at all, PLEASE help me set this up. Please help me not be a bigot. Also, please help me get some sleep. I can't do this all-nighter thing. It just doesn't work for me. But I can't not do it when I could be doing something useful. I hope my pronouns didn't just throw you off there. Unless you're an Iranian women. In which case you were probably never taught what a pronoun was just in case you used it against your husband when you grew up. Sorry about that.
*As I have been doing more research on this subject, it becomes apparent that Iran is not the enemy here. Iran is still one of the best countries in the Middle East for women. They are on a self-proclaimed crusade for women's rights, including education. It is the universities themselves who are making the individual choice to restrict women's education.
