Identifying and Ranking the Political and Legal Challenges for Women Taking Political Positions in the Islamic Republic of Iran

This research aims to identify and rank the political and legal challenges of women taking political positions in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The research method consists of two qualitative and quantitative stages.  The qualitative stage ,  which attempts to identify the challenges, that has been done by thematic analysis method. At this stage, the data sampling method was purposive sampling. The quantitative method using the AHP, at this stage, the data collection tool, a Pairwise comparison questionnaire including 32 challenges to rank the challenges were provided to experts in this field. Findings show that the challenges of women taking political positions include two types of challenges: political and legal ones. Political challenges themselves are divided into two sub-themes, governmental and non-governmental. The ranking of challenges is as follows: political challenges with a weight of 0.694 have gained the first rank and legal challenges with a weight of 0.306 have gained the second rank. Among the sub-criteria of political challenge, governmental challenges with a weight of 0.713 have the first rank and non-governmental challenges with a weight of 0.287 have the second rank. Among the 32 challenges, male dominance in politics (patriarchy) with a weight of 0.07719 has won the first place. After that, the patriarchal administrative culture with a weight of 0.05542 ranked second and the lack of legal protection for women with a weight of 0.05263 ranked third. Findings show that macro-challenges related to political structure are more important than individual challenges and micro level. These results are consistent with some other researches .