[LogicalBorg]

> 70% of science/engineering students in Iran are women:

The Forbes site you reference cites a Quora post, which quotes a Wikipedia article. What the Wikipedia article actually says is that 373,415 out of 1.5 million engineering students in Iran are women, which is 24.9%, not 70%.

This is not that different from the 19-20% of engineering degrees awarded to women in the U.S.

[smsm42]

Right now Wikipedia says:

One in four (26%) Iranian researchers is a woman, which is close to the world average (28%). In 2008, half of researchers were employed in academia (51.5%), one-third in the government sector (33.6%) and just under one in seven in the business sector (15.0%). Within the business sector, 22% of researchers were women in 2013, the same proportion as in Ireland, Israel, Italy and Norway.

Quoting this UNESCO report: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002354/235406e.pdf

Looks like Forbes preferred to quote anonymous response on Quora instead, clearly considering it more authoritative source. After all, this is what distinguishes established press from amateurish projects like Wikipedia - they do thorough research and rigorous fact-checking before publishing something. Don't they?

[rayiner]

The Forbes article is talking about majors, not practicing researchers.

[smsm42]

OK, you are right. Seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_Iran... however also does not reveal anything about 70%:

The most popular in 2013 were social sciences (1.9 million students, of which 1.1 million women) and engineering (1.5 million, of which 373 415 women). Women also made up two-thirds of medical students.

Also, practicing researchers probably would be much better metric than students - if the student graduates as STEM major but then does nothing of the sort, then it's not really so relevant for participation anymore. If we had such situation in US, we would reasonably ask what is preventing those student from entering the labor market and consider situation where the distribution is 70/30 outside of university and 25/75 on the labor market abnormal.

[incompatible]

Thanks for checking it. Wikipedia accepts publications like Forbes as sources though, so misinformation in one can still end up in the other.

[swrobel]

But what does the Wikipedia article cite? It isn't a source itself...