It's Not an Outcome, It's a Strategy: Strategic Gender Targeting in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

Why do authoritarian regimes continue to target women’s rights during periods of crisis, even when moderation would appear to be the more strategically rational response? This thesis examines this puzzle through a qualitative case study of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Drawing on literature from authoritarianism, repression, and feminist political science, it identifies four explanations for strategic gender targeting: (1) gender repression as a low-cost and politically useful form of repression; (2) gender regulation as a mechanism for maintaining ideological legitimacy and social control; (3) gender hierarchies as essential to the reproduction of coercive institutions; and (4) women as high-impact mobilizers whose participation increases the effectiveness and legitimacy of mass protest movements. Using process tracing and temporal sequencing across five historical epochs, from the 1979 Islamic Revolution to the Women, Life, Freedom movement, this thesis evaluates the explanatory power of each mechanism in the Iranian context. The findings demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s targeting of women is driven primarily by the regime’s reliance on gender regulation as a central pillar of ideological legitimacy and social control, with women serving as symbolic “border guards” of the revolutionary state. Strong evidence also supports the argument that women’s capacity to mobilize broad, cross-cutting protest coalitions has led the regime to increasingly target women as a preemptive strategy of authoritarian survival. By contrast, the maintenance of coercive institutions through gender hierarchies plays a secondary role, while the argument that gender repression persists because it is merely a low-cost strategy receives limited empirical support. These findings challenge assumptions that moderation is the expected authoritarian response to crisis and instead demonstrate that gendered repression can constitute a deliberate and central strategy of regime resilience.