Newsmaker

Daily letters from USA Today writer in Iran

(USA Today)
Updated: 2006-08-24 09:10

Day 4: Meeting Iran's first female stockbroker shatters several misperceptions

I was immediately intrigued when my translator, Pejman, suggested a meeting with Mahnaz Sadeghnobari. All he had to tell me was that she is a stockbroker. A female broker isn't a big deal back home. But in Iran? I had to meet this woman.
We drove to her office a few blocks from the Tehran Stock Exchange. Inside a nondescript building is a modern suite of blond wood, sleek silver light fixtures and flat-panel screens.

Right away, Sadeghnobari did something unusual: She reached out to shake my hand. A westerner doesn't initiate a handshake with an Iranian woman; in some circles, it's still considered forward.

Stockbroker Mahnaz Sadeghnobari in her Tehran office.[USA Today]

Sadeghnobari, 54, told me she was watching TV one day in 1990 and saw that the Islamic government, which had shuttered the stock exchange after the 1979 revolution, was reopening it. "I told myself this is a good business for me," she said as a male waiter poured us coffee.

So she went down to the exchange the next day to make sure it was okay for a woman to work as a stockbroker. No problem, she was told. After the required apprenticeship, Sadeghnobari opened her own shop and became Iran's first female broker.

I was having a hard time getting my mind around the idea of a woman financial adviser in this very male-dominated part of the world. But if she faced resistance, it didn't seem to have left any marks. About 60% of her clients are men.

"These limitations they (in the west) think we have in Iran, actually we don't have," she said. "…I see in your eyes (you think) I'm a feminist. But I'm not."

In the U.S., we're pretty much past the point where there's any purpose in remarking upon a professional woman's clothes (although it happens all the time.) Here, it's not so simple.

Iran isn't a land of burkas like next-door Afghanistan. In the trendier precincts of north Tehran, instead of funereal chadors — those billowing black head-to-toe coverings — young women wear coats called manteaus and cover their heads with colorful scarves. The manteaus vary in length, like western hemlines, as well as fit. Some are roomy and unflattering. Others are shorter and stylishly snug. The bottom line is there's plenty of room for individual choice, even if it isn't exactly what we are accustomed to.

My stockbroker friend covers her head with a black scarf called a rousari. But today she was pairing it with a fashionable tan manteau and peach fingernail polish. Still, she waved away talk about what it all means. "It's not important what I'm wearing," she said. "It's important what I'm thinking, and what I can do for my country."

Maybe a female Iranian stockbroker isn't such a foreign concept after all.