فصلنامه علوم اجتماعی
سال بیست و ششم شماره 1 (پیاپی 84، بهار 1398)

The disproportion between women’s presence in managerial levels and gender distribution of population as well as education have been an underlying basis to some studies regarding the examination of women’s barriers to accessing managerial levels. By using Cromie’s framework, in this study, posed theories on barriers to women’s job promotion have been classified into two categories: Internal and external barriers, and consequently, the domestic empiricial studies conducted in this field have been explored based on that framework from 2006 to 2016. Broadly speaking, theories related to internal barriers have sought the barriers to women’s access to managerial positions in relation to their role requirements and job involvements. In contrast, theories concerning about external barriers accentuate such attitudinal factors as gender stereotypes and structural factors as glass ceiling and gender discrimination. Utilizing meta-analysis, in this article, we have chosen our reviewed studies based on systematic search through 4 domestic scientific databases. The results of 20 mata-analyzed studies indicate that the findings of these studies, by and large, confirm the external barriers. Moreover, in some cases, there is a meaningful difference between women and men in relation to their preference regarding internal or external barriers impacting on women’s access to managerial positions.

College years are a golden time in any person’s life, and campus life is an important stage in the road to obtaining a university degree.  Greater Tehran is home to most prestigious universities and colleges in the country, so there is fierce competition to get accepted in these universities. If someone is admitted to a Tehran-based university, they practically begin a new chapter in their campus life.  The present research delves deep into the challenges and difficulties of the campus life among female students of a number of Tehran’s universities.  An attempt has been made to give some insight into the somewhat vague concept of female students living on the campus.  Campuses set strict rules for daily life of female students, directly wielded by policy-making bodies in higher echelons in university administration. An in-depth qualitative content analysis of data collected by a semi-structured questionnaire filled in by 12 female students aged 21-41 attempted to make an understanding of the challenges of living on the campus.  The analysis provided 10 main categories of difficulties. Decline of privacy, paucity of leisure time, non-existence of free will, re-imposition of stereotype gender roles, and law as the master signifier stand out among other categories.

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between social body acceptance and cultural capital and the tendency towards cosmetic surgery. The study was conducted through a survey, and the population included all the 15-54-year-old women living in Malayer in 2016. The sample size estimated through the Cochran formula was 656, and the sample was selected by simple random and multiphase cluster sampling method. The descriptive results showed that women had a high tendency towards cosmetic surgery (46.5). At the medium level, they posessed cultural capital (37.63), and on the average to upward level (39.7), they desired to be accepted. The regression results showed that from among the independent variables, the dimensions of cultural capital (i.e., objectified, embodied, and institutionalized) and social body acceptance (i.e., general, organizational, and peer), objectified capital (B= 0.51), general social acceptance (B= 0.49), institutionalized cultural capital (B= 0.26), and peer acceptance (B= 0.22) had the highest share in explaining the dependent variable. Furthermore, the prediction equation of the degree of women’s tendency towards cosmetic surgery could explain 58.1% of  the variance of  the dependent variable. The results also showed that the most common reasons for cosmetic surgery included manifested consumption, objective well-being, and social acceptance.

In the current historical period, understanding sexual relationships is not possible, unless they are contemplated upon through the history of  the formation of modern society, the alteration of the concept of love, relationship and intimacy. Thus, the present paper seeks to answer the following question: how do Tehran middle class women as modern women understand their sexual relationship with their spouses, and how do they define it? The concepts of Giddens’ pure relationship, Bauman’s liquid love, and Foucault’s sexuality history were used to explain the data. In-depth interviews were conducted with 28 middle class women of Tehran in 2018-2019, and the requirements were the age limit of 45 and having been married for at least five years. The results showed that the women define the sexual relationship with their husbands as female marital duties, dealing with spouses, an opportunity to control their spouses, a way to secure marital life, and mutual intimacy and pleasure. The constrains of meeting this desire were male sexual dysfunctions, the husbands’ lack of knowledge regarding proper sexual relationships, feeling frustrated in the relationship due to early marriages, lack of verbal communication, and the husbands’ extramarital relationships. Women’s compensation mechanisms include financial compensation, and extra-marital relations.

The phenomenon of  labor children is one of the social problems that has attracted the attention of many researchers in recent years. However, in many cases, the female children of labor having been neglected. In the present paper, it has been attempted to investigate the lived experience of female children of labor using a qualitative research method and conducting phenomenological studies. To this end, in-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 23 girls of 6 to 16 years of age who had the lived experience of both working and living on the street. The research findings show that the girls’ perception and description of work on the street and the understanding of their narratives can be categorized into four main themes: “Contextual and ethnic characteristics”, “Typology of daily activities based on gender”, “Spatial domains of work”, and “Skills and techniques”. The research findings also show that the backgrounds and contexts of girls’ work on the street can be categorized into the following four categories: “Living in disintegrated families”, “Poverty and helplessness”, “Girls’ labor as support for the family”, and “The double exploitation and strict control of female children of labor”.

The present research is aimed at understanding the experiences of Iranian women in France as immigrants regarding their body and dress norms. The study was conducted based on a comprehensive sociological analysis of the work of individuation of social actors and through a comprehensive survey and thematic analysis. Deep semi-structured talks were held with the participants, composed of 24 Iranian women aged between 26 to 42 years old who had been living between one to 15 years in France. The results indicate that there are four types of comprehension of the body, including comprehension of  the  body as an aesthetic, banal, emancipatory and sexual object. Also, three strategies were recognized including integration, differentiation and singularization in the immigration interview. In the process of making their feminine selves reach hegemonic feminity with their dressing codification, the women have different experiences ranging from adaptation to consistent syncretization of French and Iranian dressing codes and heterogeneous norms.

The aim of the present study is a sociological investigation of women suffering from HIV/AIDS through an emic approach.  The study utilizes the qualitative method of grounded theory, and the field of the research is Kerman, with the participants being women referring to the behavioral diseases counseling center. The data were collected via sequential interviews with fifty women. Data analysis culminated in five categories and one core category which were: exclusion-support, biographical disruption, vagueness of  the patient’s rights, double powerlessness, and losing self. The core category was “The trap of women’s powerlessness in the process of an identity-oriented disease.” Generally, the findings indicate that the women’s powerlessness is a consequence of their exclusion and biographical disruption in the process of the disease. Also, the  powerlessness in conjunction with the gender powerlessness culminated in weakness of the patient’s agency during treatment.