Ahmadinejad has nominated two women as new ministers for the health, and the welfare and social security: Fatemeh Ajorlou and Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi. Both of them are members of conservative front in the parliament as well as the supporters of Ahmadinejad. There were among those hard-liners who spoke, last year, in favor of Ahmadinejad’s family law bill which was going to make it easier for men to marry second wife. They have been defending gender segregation in public sphere such as universities, public transportations, parks, and etc. They believe women’s first priority dutis are to serve their husbands and to raise children. However one could ask them what they are doing in politics instead of committing their “priorities.”
After all the mess Ahmadinejad made by his fraud election, it seems that he has decided, once again, to pose a popular gesture by introducing two women for his cabinet. He might think that the hard pressure on women’s rights activists in the first term of his presidency, and the brutality the activists faced in post-election period can be forgotten with such a show off.
It worths to mention that these two women have not peresented any kind of differences with misogynous hardliner men in the way they think and talk about women’s issues and women’s status in the society. Ahmadinjad has chosen them to show that he is the first president in the Islamic Republic who dared to introduce women as the ministers, in addition to have someones in his cabinet that assure him they will not object any of his decisions. Ahmadinejad knows that these two women back any of his anti-women bills as they did for his family law bill; the bill that Iranian women’s rights activists could stop its ratification in the parliament.
Albeit, some might argue that the presence of women in Ahamdinejad’s cabinet would be positive in the way that it will make it easier for the future presidents to have women as the ministers in their state, the women that hopefully might be committed to women’s rights and welfare.