Neither. Obviously Iran is not an egalitarian society; the idea’s absurd. However, Iran is also not Afghanistan; most people have a broadly secular edification. Iranian men do go to university in quite large numbers.
I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.
We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).
I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.
We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).