According to the LAHIG report, the court imposed the stoning penalty on the woman along with lashings and a 25-year prison sentence.

The criminal court in the city of Rasht in Gilan issued the sentence.

Kh,” was first reported on the Persian-language Iranian website LAHIG on Saturday.

More than 3 million educated Iranian women over 30 are unmarried, according to Mizan, the official news agency of Iran’s judiciary.

Their numbers are increasing as divorce becomes more common and more women attend universities, exposing them to careers and incomes independent of men who, by law and custom, are supposed to be their guardians.

It is interesting to note that the opposition to women in universities started several years before women outnumbered men.

So this is not a matter of the more traditional and conservative law makers in Iran (perhaps the authors of the report among them) not feeling comfortable in relying on the invisible hand to correct the gender imbalance in Iranian universities.