Exposing U.S. Hypocrisy on Rights of Women in Iran

If the genuine intention of the U.S. is to liberate women, why are its sanctions and actions precisely targeted at the institutions where those same women are contributing to nation building?

Exploring the West and the U.S. hypocrisy on rights of women in Iran

For the many decades the tensions between Washington and Tehran have been going on, America has always presented itself as a strong defender of the rights of women in Iran, and even across the wider Muslim world.

Before the current conflict between the two nations erupted, it had already become common practice for American officials to step onto the podium during press conferences and speak with deep emotion about the suffering of women under the Islamic Republic. They would express their concerns in powerful words as the cameras captured every moment. The world has always watched this playbook as an integral part of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

However, let us be honest about something many people are uncomfortable to speak out loudly. When the United States talks about rights of women in Iran, it is not really talking about women. On the contrary, it is talking about power. And that difference matters more than most people are willing to admit.

“And every year, somewhere between 1,700 and 1,900 women are killed in America, most of them by current or former partners. Three women every single day by any reasonable standard that is a national emergency.”

Let us begin with the realities on the ground that many people may not have encountered in Western mainstream media. Iranian women account for roughly 59 to 60 percent of university students in that country. UNESCO and World Bank data have been saying this consistently for well over a decade. That figure, worth noting, is actually higher than female university enrollment in several Western countries that spend considerable energy boasting about gender equality.

Western commentators have often portrayed Muslim women as being confined and oppressed within their homes due to Islamic culture. However, Iran appears to be challenging these narratives by presenting a different reality that contradicts the widely held perceptions about women in the Muslim world.

It is now becoming clear that Iranian women are not sitting at home waiting to be rescued. They are in the laboratories, the hospitals, the engineering departments. They have made real contributions to aerospace research and advanced scientific programs that the regime in Washington has been calling strategic threats.

So here is the question nobody at those press conferences ever answers. If the genuine intention of the U.S. is to liberate women, why are its sanctions and actions precisely targeted at the institutions where those same women are contributing to nation building? Should we call that liberation, or something that deserves a more honest name?

The picture inside America itself is not any more flattering. American women still earn roughly 84 to 85 cents for every dollar a man takes home, and that gap has barely shifted in twenty years. The World Economic Forum placed the United States 43rd globally on gender parity in 2023, behind countries that American politicians would never dare hold up as examples of anything worth admiring.

And every year, somewhere between 1,700 and 1,900 women are killed in America, most of them by current or former partners. That represents three women every single day. By any reasonable standard, that constitutes a national emergency. Yet it never manages to produce the same heated urgency on the floor of Congress that Iran reliably generates. It is worth sitting with that question seriously.

Scholars who have spent their careers studying this dynamic have documented it with a rigor that is difficult to dismiss. Leila (1992) in her landmark work Women and Gender in Islam traced how the British colonial administration in Egypt deployed the language of women’s liberation as a central justification for occupation, while simultaneously, and without any apparent sense of irony, opposing the suffragette movement back home in England.

The man most associated with this posture, Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring), the British Consul-General in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, spoke endlessly about rescuing Egyptian women from the veil while blocking women’s voting rights in Britain. Leila’s argument is precise and devastating. The concern was never really about women. It was about constructing a narrative of civilizational superiority that made domination look like generosity.

Lila (2013) in “Do Muslim Women Need Saving?” extends this argument into the present moment. She examines how the same logic was revived and deployed after September 2001, when the “liberation” of Afghan women was suddenly placed at the center of the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan. Lila raises a question that should make anyone uncomfortable: why does Western concern for Muslim women intensify so reliably at the precise moment military intervention is being considered?

Leila (1992) and Lila (2013) wrote about different eras and different countries, but they were describing the same manoeuvre. And it is being performed again, right now, with the same script and the same disregard for the actual human beings the performance claims to be about.

The women filling Iranian lecture halls, conducting research in Iranian laboratories, and navigating the constraints of their own society on their own terms do not feature in Trump’s tweets or Rubio’s Senate speeches. What features instead is a simplified, flattened image of victimhood, one that has been carefully constructed to make sanctions look like solidarity and hostility look like help.

None of this is an argument that women in Iran face no difficulties. They do, as women in every country do, some more acutely than others. There are legitimate grievances, and Iranian women themselves have articulated those grievances, loudly, at real personal risk. But that struggle is theirs. It does not belong to Washington as a foreign policy talking point, and it is certainly not advanced by sanctions, threats, or the moral posturing of a government that demonstrably cannot protect women within its own territory. That brings us to the current occupants of the White House.

Trump, Hegseth, and Rubio need to clearly understand that credibility cannot be declared in a tweet posted after a long afternoon nap. For some reason these men appear to genuinely believe that when they fire off long threatening posts aimed at Tehran’s leadership, that leadership will tremble and submit to the pressure. On the contrary, it will not and the rest of the world is watching with considerably less credulity than they seem to assume. Credibility is built through consistency, not through a revolving list of justifications that changes depending on the news cycle.

First it was liberating Iranian women, when that did not land, it became dismantling the missile programme. Then opening the Strait of Hormuz, and then obliterating nuclear facilities. At one point the oil was mentioned, then quickly abandoned when someone apparently reminded the room that America has its own. The goalposts have moved so many times now that nobody can keep up with where they currently stand.

Coming back to the specific matter of women’s rights: if the United States is serious about the world taking its advocacy on this issue at face value, it must first reckon honestly with what is happening in Texas, in Mississippi, in the wage slips of American women, and at the front doors where three women are dying every single day.

Until that reckoning happens, the threatening speeches from Washington about Iran read less like concern for women and more like a convenient excuse for something else altogether. And frankly, we have seen enough of that kind of concern to know exactly what it costs the people it claims to be helping.