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Why The Pandemic Hits Iran's Working Women Harder

Joblessness is soaring in the western Asian nation, particularly among women, who are far more likely than men to be cut loose by employers.

Women wearing masks shop at a bazaar in downtown Tehran, Iran.
Women wearing masks shop at a bazaar in downtown Tehran, Iran.

The pandemic has taken a heavy toll on all sectors of Iran's fragile economy. But it's the country's female workforce — less than 20% of all workers before the crisis — that may be hardest hit.

Often the first to be laid off, women are also more likely than men to lose customers. Iran's Statistics Center estimates that 1.5 million fewer Iranians were working in the March-May period compared to the same months in 2019. Of those, nearly 685,000 are women.

The pandemic began to take off in Iran around February, compounding problems for a country that had already been dealing with intermittent Western sanctions in past years.

Mahnaz Qadirzadeh, a labor relations specialist, recently told the ILNA news agency in Tehran that women were "not even a fifth of the workforce" and had now become a sixth, following layoffs. The labor market in Iran "is not fair on women," Qadirzadeh said. Even in the best of times they find it hard to secure work. "More importantly, they struggle to keep their jobs," she added.

The pandemic, Qadirzadeh explained, has shown that women are the first to suffer from economic instability. Of the approximately 1.5 million people who've lost their jobs, the "rational" proportion of women affected should have been "between 250,000-300,000," she said. Instead it's more than twice that number.

Reports from Tehran suggest that the pandemic has been particularly hard on small businesses and the self-employed. Many of the latter are female heads of household.

Even in the best of times women find it hard to secure work.

A deputy-head of the state welfare organization, Habibollah Mas'udi-Farid, observed in late April that the spreading epidemic in Iran and "rising prices' had an especially negative impact on self-employed women, who are often excluded from the categories of workers to whom the government is paying unemployment aid, benefits or loans.

The pandemic's hardships have merely added to more traditional hurdles facing female workers, such as inferior wages or working without proper contracts. Women are usually the first to be dismissed as the pervasive belief among employers is that men are the household breadwinners and should keep working if possible.

Qadirzadeh said the crisis is particularly affecting working women in cities, and that many are trained or educated and entered the job market in recent years. So far the women working in farming or as craftswomen appear to be less impacted.

The situation is especially worrisome given how precarious things already were for so many working women. A worsening economy, she explained, may force them to "to accept more unfair working conditions' or even "exploitation."

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Green

Forest Networks? Revisiting The Science Of Trees And Funghi "Reaching Out"

A compelling story about how forest fungal networks communicate has garnered much public interest. Is any of it true?

Thomas Brail films the roots of a cut tree with his smartphone.

Arborist and conservationist Thomas Brail at a clearcutting near his hometown of Mazamet in the Tarn, France.

Melanie Jones, Jason Hoeksema, & Justine Karst

Over the past few years, a fascinating narrative about forests and fungi has captured the public imagination. It holds that the roots of neighboring trees can be connected by fungal filaments, forming massive underground networks that can span entire forests — a so-called wood-wide web. Through this web, the story goes, trees share carbon, water, and other nutrients, and even send chemical warnings of dangers such as insect attacks. The narrative — recounted in books, podcasts, TV series, documentaries, and news articles — has prompted some experts to rethink not only forest management but the relationships between self-interest and altruism in human society.

But is any of it true?

The three of us have studied forest fungi for our whole careers, and even we were surprised by some of the more extraordinary claims surfacing in the media about the wood-wide web. Thinking we had missed something, we thoroughly reviewed 26 field studies, including several of our own, that looked at the role fungal networks play in resource transfer in forests. What we found shows how easily confirmation bias, unchecked claims, and credulous news reporting can, over time, distort research findings beyond recognition. It should serve as a cautionary tale for scientists and journalists alike.

First, let’s be clear: Fungi do grow inside and on tree roots, forming a symbiosis called a mycorrhiza, or fungus-root. Mycorrhizae are essential for the normal growth of trees. Among other things, the fungi can take up from the soil, and transfer to the tree, nutrients that roots could not otherwise access. In return, fungi receive from the roots sugars they need to grow.

As fungal filaments spread out through forest soil, they will often, at least temporarily, physically connect the roots of two neighboring trees. The resulting system of interconnected tree roots is called a common mycorrhizal network, or CMN.

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