Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Iran’s parliament today approved the appointment of the first female cabinet minister in the Islamic Republic’s 30-year history, accepting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nomination.

Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi was approved as health minister, Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani said in a live state television broadcast. Two other female nominees, Fatemeh Ajorlou as minister for welfare and social security and Sousan Keshavarz as education minister, failed to get parliament’s vote of confidence, Larijani said.

The parliament approved today 18 of Ahmadinejad’s nominees for his 21-member cabinet and rejected three, according to the vote which was carried live on state television.

By nominating women for ministerial posts, Ahmadinejad has “ushered a significant political turning point for women in Iran, something that not even his reformist arch-rival Mohammad Khatami was able to do,” said Gala Riani, Middle East analyst for London-based business intelligence and forecasting company IHS Global Insight.

Although Khatami had female vice-presidents during his presidency, which ended in 2005, there have been no female cabinet ministers in the Islamic Republic.

Vahid Dastjerdi has a degree in obstetrics and gynecology and is currently an associate professor and a member of the Medical Ethics Board Committee at the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, according to the state-run Press TV news channel.

Riani said that Ahmadinejad’s nomination of the three women “ought not to be read as a significant shift in the president’s political stance.”

Ahmadinejad has said that a woman’s most important job is “at home” and that mothers have an “elevated role in society.” Last year, he proposed a plan for the working day for married women to be cut by two hours and by an additional hour with the birth of each child, with no change to salary.

Placating Protesters

“It may be a way of redeeming himself from some of the damaging fall-out of the post-election protests in which women of all ages and social backgrounds participated,” she wrote in an e-mail.

In an Aug. 30 speech before parliament in support of his Cabinet nominees, Ahmadinejad said some 60 percent of Iran’s university graduates are female.

“What is the ceiling to their progress?” he asked lawmakers. “If we tell a woman that she can’t become a minister, the same logic can be used to tell her she can’t become a manager,” he said. Having women in the cabinet is the “most significant cultural act” for the country and will “take the message of the Iranian revolution to the world.”

Some conservative factions and politicians have questioned the suitability of women for ministerial posts.

Religious Doubts

“There are religious doubts over the abilities of women when it comes to management,” Mohammad Taghi Rahbar, the head of the Parliament’s clergy, said earlier this month.

Other lawmakers criticized Ahmadinejad’s choice of candidates and said he should have consulted lawmakers.

“If the president wanted to do something unprecedented by naming women to ministerial posts would it have harmed to discuss it with the parliament beforehand and to put forth good managers and experienced women?” lawmaker Ahmad Tavakoli was cited as saying by parliament’s news Web site.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ladane Nasseri in Beirut at lnasseri@bloomberg.net; Ali Sheikholeslami in London at alis2@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: September 3, 2009 05:43 EDT