Do social assistance programs respond to the needs of male- and female-headed households differently? It is well-known that economic shocks and some market conditions could have differential impact on men and women (World Bank 2012). However, there is less known about how the application of social protection varies by gender. A large literature has examined the effectiveness of individual policies and schemes, some of which take account of gender differences (Duflo 2012), but the overall patterns of social assistance have hardly been studied in this respect. Understanding the gender differences in the provision of social assistance is important particularly because men and women use their resources differently. As a result, differential treatments could be more or less welfare-enhancing depending on who receives the assistance. In this paper, we focus on the case of Iran and take a step to assess the ways in which social assistance to households varies by household characteristics, particularly the gender of the head of household. The case of Iran is interesting to study because social transfers in Iran have been substantial and the country’s income distribution has been improving since the early 1990s. So, it is important to explore how social aid resources have been allocated to households and what impact they have had on spending and distribution. The gender issue has also been important in this respect because the percentage of beneficiaries among female-headed households has been far larger than among male-headed households. At the same time, the amounts allocated per household has been, on average, smaller in case of female compared to male heads, though this relation reverses once we account for the differences in household characteristics. Indeed, we find that once these factors are taken into account, Iran’s social assistance system favors women, especially when they are poor, single, uneducated, widowed/divorced, and out-of-labor-force. Also, the relationships between assistance provision and household characteristics are different for female- and male-headed households in ways that suggest the predominance of a strong male-breadwinner view in the system. Our source of data is Iran’s Household Expenditure and Income Survey (HEIS) which has been collected annually since 1984 by the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI). We start by reviewing the background literature and continue by describing the social assistance system in Iran. We then turn to the question about who receives assistance and how that assistance varies by the characteristics of the households.