As schools opened in Iran early in September and textbooks for the new year were distributed, parents realized that the illustration on the cover of the third-grade math book, for ages 8 to 9, was missing any images of girls. In previous years, the cover illustration showed three boys and two girls playing under a large graphic of ‘three’.

Schools, both private and public, are required to use as textbooks only those published by the Ministry of Education. Their content, including books for science and math, is expected to convey and reflect ‘Islamic’ values and lifestyles.

The omission of girls from the new math book’s cover has led many Iranians to make charges of sexism on social media. Some point out the most prominent Iranian mathematician of the past 100 years was Maryam Mirzakhani, who was professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Mirzakhani, who died aged only 40 in 2017, was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, often described as the ‘Nobel Prize of mathematics’.

In an Instagram post on Wednesday, illustrator Nasim Bahari said her original illustration for the book seven years ago had now been rejected because one girl was sitting on a tree and the other looked as if she was running to hug one of the boys.

Javad Hosseini, who served as the acting education minister for a few months in  2019, said research he had conducted ten years earlier had found gender stereotypes in 70 percent of the contents of school textbooks, including in images and the names of characters. Hosseini had also found men responsible for a similar percentage the planning and production of textbooks.

A conscious ‘Islamization’ of primary, middle and high school books started soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The process has applied not only to literature, art and all illustrations in the teaching of history. Last year textbooks were revised to play down historical rivalry between Iran and Russia, particularly in the 18^th and early 19^th century, reflecting Tehran’s current desire for closer relations with Moscow.