Did Sanctions, Covid-19 Cost Women Jobs in Iran?

In an IIEA panel held virtually on March 9, Nadereh Chamlou asked how sanctions impacted women’s employment, to which economist Djavad Salehi Isfahani responded on his weblog. 
“My answer was that identifying the impact of sanctions on women’s employment is difficult, but I believe Covid hit women harder than sanctions. The loss of female employment has been observed around the world, where women had to quit their jobs to care for their children whose schools were closed, or had other Covid-related extra household work. Later on, Hashem Pesaran [a US-based Iranian economist] questioned my conjecture on the importance of Covid for women’s employment, which is why after the panel, I looked more carefully at the labor force survey [LFS] data, which confirm my statement,” Salehi Isfahani said in the article, the relevant portions of which are presented below:
The data from LFS for the past 10 years show that the number of women employed reached a maximum of 4.3 million during 2018-19, when sanctions were toughest. This number fell to 3.7 million in 2020, most likely because of Covid since sanctions did not intensify in 2020. 
Furthermore, this decline was not matched by a decline in men’s employment as the ratio of female-to-male employment also fell in 2020 for all age groups. For prime age workers (25-54 years old), this ratio fell from 24.4% in 2019 to 21.3% in 2020. Roughly twice as many women lost their jobs in 2020 compared to men (665,000 vs. 357,000).