Women flying high in the US and India. But, grounded in Iran!

Maybe the end of men is coming sooner than expected!

First, in India:

A first-hand account on the conception of a satellite, its transition into a working reality, and finally its launch into space marked the inauguration of Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE) Association of National Institute of Technology-Tiruchi (NIT-T). N.Valarmathi, India’s first woman project director to head a Remote Sensing Satellite Project, encapsulated her 28-years tryst with space technology in an attempt to motivate youngsters to tackle the multilevel engineering challenges involved in building satellites. 

There was one even before her:

 Ms. Valarmathi is the second woman to be the satellite project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) after T. K. Anuradha, who headed the communication satellite GSAT-12 programme, but she is the first woman to head a remote sensing satellite project.

India's women are reaching new heights in a country that has had quite a few women as chief ministers in a number of states and, of course, as a prime minister too!

Here in the US, the senior-most position of the President's cabinet has been held by women for twelve of the last sixteen years: Madeline Albright, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton.  So much so that Foreign Policy notes, in somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek fashion, "Is America ready for a male secretary of state?"

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has visited more than 100 nations during her tenure, flown 897,951 miles, and spent 376 days abroad. By making it to 110 countries in just one term, Clinton broke the previous record for most countries visited by a secretary: 98, held by Madeleine Albright. And although Condoleezza Rice visited fewer countries, she did log more than a million miles in the air. 

 A chuckling advice to the GOP contender:

Maybe as Mitt Romney struggles to gain traction in the presidential race, he will be tempted to engage in some classic special-interest politics and promise to appoint a man as secretary of state. The move would certainly be welcomed by American men who often feel aggrieved and underappreciated in the workplace. And certainly men remain an important minority when it comes to presidential voting (they constituted 46 percent of voters in the 2008 elections).
We just hope a man would be up to the task.

What a contrast these stories from India and the US are to this latest one from Iran!

More than 30 universities have introduced new rules banning female students from almost 80 different degree courses.
These include a bewildering variety of subjects from engineering, nuclear physics and computer science, to English literature, archaeology and business.
No official reason has been given for the move, but campaigners, including Nobel Prize winning lawyer Shirin Ebadi, allege it is part of a deliberate policy by the authorities to exclude women from education.
"The Iranian government is using various initiatives… to restrict women's access to education, to stop them being active in society, and to return them to the home," she told the BBC. 

 It is not Iran's attempts to produce nuclear weapons that ought to worry us as much such prehistoric policies ought to.

As Slate notes:

Like in the United States, Iran’s universities have more female students than male students. Female Iranians are surpassing their male peers in traditionally male-dominated studies, like science and engineering. The trend is clear. Iran’s leaders must think that the only way to prevent the “end of men” in their country is to make it illegal for women to succeed.

Maybe it is a good thing that Iran's ayatollahs want to hold women back--if not, by now Iran would have produced quite a few nukes!.  In any case, whether or not the end of men is for real, the end of these "religious" men is coming. Soon. Real soon.