News accounts about the firing of Health Minister Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi by President Ahmadinejad have emphasized her gender, because it plays well with the stereotype of Iran as a country of rampant misogyny.
Naturally, and as anyone who has followed the news should by now come to expect, the New York Times had to misrepresent even that news by claiming that Mrs. Vahid-Dastjerdi was "the only woman to serve in the cabinet since the 1979 Islamic Revolution."
Sorry, but this is completely false. What about Mrs. Soltankhah, Mrs. Javadi, and Mrs. Shojai?
In fact, the first female cabinet member in post-Revolutionary Iran was Masoumeh Ebtekar, who had also served as the spokesperson for the US Embassy hostage-takers.
Comments