Joy Reid Says Iranian Women Are As Free As Americans — The Brutal Reality Says Otherwise

Joy Reid did a side-by-side comparison of the United States and Iran, and her overall takeaway was that if American women were better off than their Iranian counterparts, they were not better off by much.

Reid, who was ousted from her regular gig with liberal network MSNBC before NBC News jettisoned the now rebranded cable news network (MS NOW), argued that the United States had secret police just like Iran and was just as oppressive when it came to how women were treated — although she listed off the “oppressive” policies impacting American women and did not mention one of the many that affect Iranian women. The only real difference, she claimed, was that American oppression came at the hands of Christians and Iran’s oppressive regime was rooted in Islam.

WATCH:

Joy Reid: America is a Christian form of Iran & women may have be better off there pic.twitter.com/mDAheewOPU

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 16, 2026

“We get told, particularly when it comes to Arabs and Muslims and Africans, that people are just diabolically evil for no reason, right? That they do things because they hate our freedoms. We were told this about Iraq, that they just hated us for no damn reason at all,” Reid said, suggesting that the narrative was invented out of whole cloth in order to justify American actions.

“Now, I’m not saying that that regime is not bad, but, by the way, our regime is not good,” Reid continued. “Our regime has secret police. They have secret police. Our regime is oppressing women, taking away abortion rights, taking away women’s rights in like 26 states — some states where they’re trying to have the death penalty for having an abortion.”

Reid acknowledged briefly that the Iranian rulers “also oppress women,” but omitted the extent of that oppression. A number of the regime’s laws — and the punishment for breaking them — only apply to women.

• Women must adhere to a mandatory dress code that requires covering their hair, arms, and legs in public. The regime’s so-called “morality police” — along with surveillance cameras — enforce the rule, and women who disobey could face hefty fines, prison sentences of five to 15 years, or be barred from travel. In 2022, for example, the morality police arrested Mahsa Amini for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, and she died after they brutally beat her. Nationwide protests followed.
• Women can be arrested or thrown in prison for social media posts showing them without their hijabs or for posting dance videos online.
• Women must also wear a hijab when appearing in films or on television, because Iranian law requires the covering in all public media.
• Women are not permitted to sing solos in front of mixed audiences, meaning that female performers are restricted to performing at female-only events or recorded performances.
• Women have often been banned from attending men’s sporting events, especially soccer matches, leading to a number of women being arrested for dressing as men in order to attend such events.
• Many women require permission from a father or male guardian to marry, regardless of their age at the time, if it is their first marriage.
• Girls can legally be married at 13, but a younger girl can be forced to marry if her father or a judge decrees it.
• Married women are not permitted to leave the country or obtain a passport without first getting written permission from their husbands.
• A woman’s testimony in court is only worth half of a man’s testimony.
• Women typically inherit less than men, meaning that daughters usually receive only half the inheritance that would be given to sons.
• The Iranian constitution bars women from ever becoming president, and women are not permitted to become judges.
• Married women can be legally barred from holding a job if their husbands claim that their work conflicts with their family obligations.
• Men can file for and obtain divorces for any reason, but women risk losing inheritances and child custody — and are rarely granted divorces anyway.

Reid, clearly unbothered by that, went on to claim, “They have the highest rate of women who are in STEM careers. We’re kicking women out of the military, out of university. We’re saying that DEI means women can’t be hired for high positions in the sciences.”

While it has been claimed in viral social media posts that 70% of STEM graduates in Iran are women, data from the United Nations shows that 25% of Iran’s STEM graduates are female.

“So we’re marginally better,” Reid concluded. “And we’re doing it for Christianity, they’re doing it for Islam, right? So, it’s like we don’t get told those things because it would take away the kind of American exceptionalism narrative that makes it easy to take our people and send them off to die in a war that we have nothing to do with, that we don’t want.”

The Daily Wire’s Isabel Brown fired back at Reid, saying, “Forgive my Christian ignorance but when was the last time a woman was BEATEN TO DEATH BY THE MORALITY POLICE for a sliver of her hair showing in a Christian country?”