Firsthand reports from contributors inside Iran
For years, young women from smaller cities and conservative families came to Tehran to study, to work, to breathe. Now, one by one, many are being forced to leave.
Tehran was supposed to be the place they came to become themselves. They got into top universities, found jobs, rented apartments with friends. They built lives of their own.
A year of protests, crackdown, war and economic freefall has pushed many to the edge. Rent has become unbearable. Prices rise by the week. Incomes shrink or disappear.
They are moving back to Ahvaz, Shiraz or smaller towns to live with family because they can no longer afford Tehran. Some are selling gold, burning through savings or taking on debt to survive one more month.
The economic shock is everywhere. Layoffs are spreading. Inflation has become so absurd that people joke shops are still full of staples only because no one can afford to buy them.
And now, as if rent and inflation were not enough, officials say metro, bus and taxi fares in Tehran will rise next month. Even getting to work is becoming more expensive.
But for many, the deepest blow has come from the collapse of the digital economy.
In Iran, Instagram was more than an app. It was a shopfront, a beauty salon, a classroom, an office. Women sold clothes and cosmetics, baked cakes, offered beauty services, taught languages, designed logos and built small businesses from their bedrooms.
Now much of that is gone.
After two months of severe internet disruption, many online businesses are collapsing. Orders have dried up. Customers cannot browse. Payments are delayed. Messages do not go through.
Sima, 29, runs a small online clothing business. For two months, she says, almost no orders have come in. What once brought in modest but steady income has become little more than an empty storefront.
Baran, 34, says she feels herself “going crazy” thinking about how quickly life is unraveling. The online business she spent years building is collapsing. Payments are not arriving. Debts are piling up.
“Everything we built with blood and tears is going up in smoke,” she says.
What makes it worse is the silence. No explanation. No accountability. Just the slow erasure of livelihoods.
Layoffs in offices and shops appear to hit women especially hard. There are no official figures, but many suspect employers assume men are more likely to be breadwinners. A woman, they think, may have a husband or father to fall back on. But many do not—or do not want to.
For many women here, losing a job is not just losing income. It can mean losing a home, a city and a life they fought hard to build.
And so Tehran is losing its daughters.
The city that once offered escape is beginning to send them back. Back to smaller cities. Back to family homes. Back to dependence—often to the lives they thought they had escaped for good.
