“Women get absolutely zero for supporting [Hassan] Rouhani! If we hadn’t voted in this election, does Rouhani think he would have gotten re-elected with the numbers he did?” Leila, a 34-year-old women’s rights activist, shot off in an angry text on Telegram after it was revealed that Iran’s president had not nominated any women to join his second-term Cabinet. “Even [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had a woman as a minister!” Ava responded in the private group for young women’s rights activists, referring to the conservative former president’s 2009 appointment of Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi as the Islamic Republic’s first female minister. She served as health minister.

“This is a joke. How disrespectful to all the women who supported him,” added Fatemeh, a 25-year-old political science student. Most of these young women do not know each other — they are activists scattered across the country — but they share each other’s anger at the president as he begins his second term.

During both the February 2016 parliamentary elections as well as the city and village council elections of May 2017, women won an unprecedented number of seats. For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, Iranians chose women in high numbers, demonstrating that when women have the opportunity to run for office, voters do not have an issue with casting their ballots for them. Thus, understanding that the predominantly young electorate demands more social and cultural rights, including an increased presence of women in leadership positions throughout the country, 157 members of parliament wrote a letter to Rouhani on July 19 urging him to nominate women for his second-term Cabinet.

When Rouhani failed to do so, women across social media and in opinion pieces aired their dismay and anger at the president. “I don’t know if he’s trying to allay fears with the conservatives who lost badly in the elections, and that’s why he didn’t nominate any women, or if he actually doesn’t believe in women holding higher leadership positions in political life,” Farzaneh Hosseini, a women’s rights activist, told Al-Monitor. In a similar line of criticism, on Aug. 21, former conservative journalist and filmmaker Mohammad Nourizad blasted the clerical class for its “backward” views on women and blamed it — and by extension Rouhani, a cleric — for the lack of female nominees for ministerial positions. He asked, “Could it be that the hopes for anything different were just misplaced?”