Women’s work in the unofficial sector helps prop up the economy while they reap meager rewards.
Their numbers are in the millions, and they play an essential role in keeping the Iranian economy afloat in hard times. Yet most of the women working under informal terms of employment are poorly paid, routinely exploited, and largely ignored by census takers. As a female laborer in the fields of a Gilan rice farm told Tehran Bureau two years ago, “Our work is in general more than men’s, but our wages are always less.”
Iran’s working women are increasingly turning to low-security forms of employment to make ends meet, a Tehran Bureau review of publicly available data shows. At least 2.1 million of them—and perhaps many more—are employed in the “unofficial sector” (bakhshe qeyre rasmi), a nearly threefold increase since 2024, when Tehran Bureau last reported on this topic.
Encompassing informal modes of employment that lack the structure and security of work in the state and formal private sectors, this gray economic area comprises a spectrum of activities ranging from commonplace urban jobs like hairdressing and shopkeeping to traditional, often rural-based activities like at-home handicrafting and farmwork.
The World Bank categorizes those employed in the unofficial sector as “own-account workers,” or individuals who, working on their own account or with one or more partners, hold the types of positions defined as “self-employment jobs” and do not routinely engage their own employees.
By definition, this type of work does not offer the legal protections, social and healthcare benefits, and wage guarantees of formal employment. Furthermore, workers in this vast area do not constitute a cohesive group, and therefore find it more difficult than other workers to form organized labor groups. (Some are, however, active in various unofficial online women’s rights groups that effectively act as unions.)
Yet informal employment is increasingly common in Iran’s restrictive job market, where shrinking opportunities encourage cronyism. It is especially prevalent among women, whose entry into the formal job market is further impeded by gender discrimination, including systemic bias and legal restrictions.
“I requested formalization from the department head, but despite several men who started in the informal sector with me now being formalized, my request was denied,” a 41-year-old accountant told Tehran Bureau in 2024. “I was explicitly told by the department head that if not, you can leave. I can only work here under informal legal conditions.”
As a result of such discrimination, informal employment leaves working women more vulnerable to exploitation, job loss, financial instability, and unsafe working conditions. As the accountant described, “The salary is not enough to cover the rent and my child’s expenses. My daughter couldn’t go to kindergarten when she was little because I couldn’t afford the registration fee.” The inherent lack of social protections, as well as access to childcare and health services, further weakens such working women’s socioeconomic position.
(Separately, more than 90 percent of Iranian workers in formal employment, including women, are employed on the basis of renewable 89-day contracts that leave them ineligible for such benefits as pensions. Such contracts have become the standard in public and semi-public institutions.)
“Informal employment is a survival-type mechanism,” write the authors of a 2019 Allameh Tabataba’i University paper, “The Lived Experience of Female Workers in the Informal Sector of Iran’s Economy.” Although it is “strongly associated with social exclusion, when women enter the labor market, informal employment is the most important option for them.”
Available data suggests that women enter this type of employment after exhausting all other options. In 30 interviews with female workers in this sector, Tehran Bureau encountered multiple women around the age of 40 who entered the informal labor market after going through a divorce. However, this income often proves insufficient, leading most of them to depend on their families for additional support.
According to official figures, approximately 2.1 million Iranian women work in the informal economy, a 31 percent increase from the 1.6 million Tehran Bureau reported in 2024 using World Bank data. However, the true scale of women’s informal employment may be considerably greater than these figures suggest. Iran has an estimated 28 million women aged 15–55, according to UN population data, while the Statistical Center of Iran reports just 3.9 million employed women across the broader population aged 15 and over, with another 700,000 actively seeking employment.
Although the different age ranges prevent a precise comparison, the figures suggest that tens of millions of working-age Iranian women are absent from official employment statistics. While many are students, homemakers or unpaid carers, others may engage in informal, irregular or unrecorded economic activities. Moreover, Iran’s employment statistics classify anyone working as little as one hour per week as employed, potentially obscuring widespread underemployment and economic insecurity. The official figure of 2.1 million therefore captures only part of a much larger and poorly documented picture of women’s economic participation.
Vulnerable employment
Another way to assess the extent of precarious employment among Iranian women is through the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) vulnerable employment indicator. Unlike informal employment, which refers to work lacking formal registration or adequate legal and social protections, vulnerable employment is defined by employment status and encompasses own-account workers (self-employed individuals without employees) and contributing family workers, two groups particularly exposed to insecure earnings and inadequate social protection.
According to 2025 data from the World Bank, vulnerable employment in the Islamic Republic of Iran accounts for 35.6 percent of employed women and 40.2 percent of the male labor force, with the majority of those workers having own-account status. “Own-account and contributing family workers are more likely to experience low job and income security than employees and employers, as well as lower coverage by social protection systems and employment regulation,” states the International Labor Organization (ILO).
According to the World Bank, the share of jobs in Iran currently held by women is 15.7 percent, Applying that percentage to the overall number of employed persons in the country—24.98 million, according to the Statistical Center of Iran’s most recent data, collected in 2024—suggests that around 3.9 million Iranian women are currently working. However, the World Bank’s assessment likely fails to account for millions more economically active women who are miscategorized or unreported in the official census.
In which sectors are Iran’s informally employed women concentrated?
—The largest share, 45.48%, of informally employed women work in the service sector in urban areas, available data suggests.
We arrived at this number by taking the share of Iran’s population identified as urban (75.94 percent) according to the United Nations 2019 Human Development Index and applying it to the total number of informally employed women (1,511,134). This gives us the total number of informally employed, urban-dwelling women (1,147,555). We then used data from the Statistical Center of Iran determining that 59.9 percent of the urban population was employed in the service sector as of 2015. Based on this calculation, we concluded that 687,385 urban-dwelling women work in informal employment in the service sector. This is 45.48 percent of all informally employed women in Iran.
—Another 20.7% of informally employed women work in crafts and related trade.
We arrived at this number by using Statistical Center of Iran data from 2018 and made available to Tehran Bureau in 2024, which states that 20.7 percent of all employed women (or 952,200 women, according to 2025 figures) work in “crafts and related trade.” Of these, at least 35.6 percent, or a total of 338,983 women, are employed informally.
—In addition, around 18% of informally employed women work in agriculture.
We arrived at this number by using current World Bank data, which suggests that 12.7 percent, or 584,200 of all working women in Iran are active in agriculture. Of these, at least 35.6 percent, or a total of 207,975 women, are employed informally, according to ILO figures.
However, various reports indicate that many rural women, despite their active involvement in agriculture and animal husbandry, are statistically counted as housewives. A recent article by Stimson indicates that 20 percent of Iran’s employed women are in the agricultural sector.
Underpaid and undercounted
Sources interviewed by Tehran Bureau conclude that women’s participation in the informal sector may be grossly underreported—a view supported by both academic and business sources. Many traditionally female activities that lead to the production of marketable farm goods are broadly considered to be part of a rural woman’s role as a homemaker, and are thus not reported in the census, Fatemeh Etemad Moghadam observed in a 2009 Journal of Iranian Studies paper, “Undercounting Women’s Work in Iran.” The situation is similar in urban areas, where women of all social strata undertake informal employment. Often, they are miscategorized as homemakers in the census, which only provides categories for labor performed outside the home.
“One of the biggest problems of the women’s community who are active economically is that, unfortunately, no authority has yet taken responsibility for announcing accurate statistics and figures,” Tehran Chamber of Commerce member Nasim Tavakol recently told local media. She went on to elaborate that though such data collection falls under the purview of the vice president for women and family, that office’s ability to gather accurate economic data is severely limited. Other statistics are based on unreliable evidence of women’s economic activity, such as the number of issued trading licenses or positions as directors on private companies’ boards. “When we follow up on these women, we see they are sitting at home but nominally members of a public or private joint-stock company,” Tavakol said.
Available scholarship indicates that the services and agricultural sectors are generally more popular among Iran’s working women. A 2021 study, “Formal Versus Informal Labor Market Segmentation in Iran,” focuses on wage differentials in the Iranian labor market, particularly between formal and informal sectors. It uses household survey data from 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016 to examine wage structures and the characteristics of the informal sector. Key findings include the wage gap between the formal and informal sectors, with women’s wages being significantly lower in all sectors, especially in agricultural self-employment.
The available figures on sector-specific women’s informal employment are probably much higher in reality, especially in the countryside. Dr. Rizwan Moghadam, a researcher, women’s rights activist, and human rights activist notes that enrollment data consistently shows that an increasing number of women are studying at Iran’s universities. This year’s figures, made available by Zahra Behrouz-Azar, vice president for women and family affairs, show 52 percent of all university students are women—up from 46 percent seven years ago.
This educational growth would be expected to correspond with general growth in the female labor force, yet the available data isn’t showing that. To explain the apparently flat trajectory of overall female employment, Dr. Moghadam points to rural women as a labor force that may well be significantly, and increasingly, undercounted.