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Editorial verdict
Methodologically transparent study with meaningful contextual novelty — the Iran-based STEM setting sharpens the remote/in-person contrast beyond Western samples, but severe confounding between work modality and employment status means the core comparison cannot be cleanly interpreted; treat structural findings as hypothesis-generating, not conclusive.
Executive summary
This study examines how organizational justice, job engagement, and life satisfaction interrelate among women working in STEM fields in Iran, comparing those in fully remote (n = 100) versus fully in-person (n = 144) arrangements. Drawing on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) framework and employing psychological network analysis (Gaussian Graphical Models with EBICglasso regularization), the authors modelled nine variables as interconnected nodes and compared network structures across work modalities using the Network Comparison Test. Remote workers reported significantly more favourable mean scores on procedural, distributive, and interpersonal justice, all four engagement facets, and life satisfaction. Network structure differed significantly between groups, but this difference was attributable to a single edge: interpersonal and informational justice were conditionally associated only in the in-person network. Procedural justice had the highest strength centrality in the remote network and participation/involvement in the in-person network, while life satisfaction was peripheral in both. The authors conclude that voice-related constructs may be particularly salient resources for women in this context, regardless of work modality. Major limitations include the strong confound between work modality and employment status (81% of remote workers were full-time vs. 21% of in-person workers), the cross-sectional design, small group sizes limiting detection power, and non-probability sampling via professional networks and social media.
Key insights
- 1Procedural justice and participation/involvement were among the most central nodes in both remote and in-person networks, suggesting that voice and perceived fairness in decision-making processes occupy a structurally prominent position in women's psychological experience of STEM work regardless of work location.
- 2The only statistically significant network-level difference between remote and in-person workers was a single edge: interpersonal and informational justice were conditionally associated among in-person workers but not among remote workers, implying that supervisor-enacted fairness in treatment and communication may be perceived as a unified experience only when physical co-presence enables direct observation.
- 3Life satisfaction was peripheral in both networks — weakly connected to justice and engagement nodes once their mutual overlap was controlled — suggesting that for Iranian women in STEM, global life evaluations may be shaped more by domains beyond the workplace (including legal and social constraints) than by any single work-related experience.
- 4Remote workers reported higher mean scores on most justice and engagement dimensions, consistent with evidence that virtual settings reduce exposure to status-based bias and, in the Iranian context, to enforcement of mandatory dress codes and gendered normative scrutiny in co-located settings.
- 5The network structure comparison revealed broadly similar psychological organisation across modalities despite differences in reported levels, indicating that how justice and engagement experiences interconnect is more stable across work arrangements than the absolute levels of those experiences.
Practical takeaways
- The centrality of procedural justice and participation in both networks points to voice and fair process as structurally important workplace resources for women in STEM across different work arrangements — organisations examining inclusion in male-dominated fields may find these nodes a worthwhile focus for structural (rather than individual-level) attention.
- The divergence between mean-level differences and network-structural differences illustrates that studies of work arrangements benefit from examining both how experiences are evaluated and how those evaluations interconnect — mean comparisons alone may obscure whether the underlying psychological architecture has changed.
Frameworks mentioned
Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model
A theoretical framework classifying work characteristics into job demands (aspects requiring sustained effort with associated costs) and job resources (aspects that facilitate goal attainment, reduce demands, or support development), proposing two complementary processes: health-impairment and motivational. Used in this study as an interpretive lens for understanding how justice and engagement variables function as resources.
Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS)
A validated five-item self-report instrument measuring the cognitive component of subjective wellbeing — individuals' global evaluation of their own life — used in this study as the wellbeing node in the network model.
References
- World Economic Forum (2024).Global Gender Gap Report 2024.
- National Science Foundation (2023).Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons With Disabilities.
- FTI Consulting / American Association for the Advancement of Science (2020).STEM and the American Workforce.
- National Bureau of Economic Research (2021).Why Working From Home Will Stick.
- Global Workplace Analytics (2022).State of Remote Work 2022.
- Journal of Applied Psychology (2001).On the dimensionality of organizational justice: a construct validation of a measure.
- Journal of Personality Assessment (1985).The satisfaction with life scale.
- Journal of Applied Psychology (2001).The job demands-resources model of burnout.
- Journal of Managerial Psychology (2007).The job demands-resources model: State of the art.
- Behavior Research Methods (2018).Estimating psychological networks and their accuracy: a tutorial paper.
- Psychological Methods (2023).Comparing network structures on three aspects: a permutation test.
- Frontiers in Organizational Psychology (2024).Effects of teleworking on wellbeing from a gender perspective: a systematic review.
- Human Rights Watch (2024).Iran: New hijab law adds restrictions and punishments.
Source & Provenance
Not specified
Sarvenaz Taridashti, Hojjatollah Farahani, Manuel Gonzalez, Sajjad Bagheri, Hamid Khanipour, Sahar Badiezadeh
November 6, 2026
Research Study
Asia-Pacific
Original source metadata is preserved. AI analysis is generated separately.
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