6 female tokens in 40,427 words; DNA credited to Watson and Crick (PAGE ~1140, 1777)
No woman appears as an agent of knowledge anywhere in the corpus
Across roughly half a million words of English-medium science from every board there is not one named woman scientist. Rosalind Franklin does not occur in the corpus at all, while Watson and Crick are credited for the structure of DNA in three separate books. Across twelve Urdu-language readers, no woman is credited as the author of any selection.
Start with the arithmetic: KP's Chemistry 10 runs 55,101 words at 0.1 feminine tokens per thousand and names no woman scientist at all. Sindh's General Science 8 manages six female tokens in 40,427 words and credits DNA to Watson and Crick — Rosalind Franklin does not occur anywhere in the corpus. KP's Chemistry 9 does contain a named woman scientist, but only as the answer to a puzzle. The one real exception is KP's Physics 10 at p. 244, which names Marie Curie with her dates and credits Lise Meitner with the theory of fission, printing her portrait. One book in eleven.
What the books say
Each entry below is the catalogue's own record for that book on that
axis, printed as it stands. Pages marked PDF p. are counted from the first page of the scanned file, which is how most of this corpus was read; pages marked printed p. are the folio printed on the paper. The two differ by however many unnumbered cover leaves a volume carries, so the label matters when you go to check.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chemistry 9
Contains the corpus's only named woman scientist — and only as a puzzle answer. See §8.2
Ratio 0.38 on a low base, but it is the only book in the corpus that names two women scientists and prints one of their portraits. Marie Curie appears with her dates — "Marie (1867-1934) and Pierre Curie (1859-1906) conducted the most significant investigations of this" (PAGE 244) — and Lise Meitner is credited with the theoretical explanation of nuclear fission: "explained theoretically in January 1939 [by] Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch" (PAGE 252), with Figure 18.12 - Lise Meitner on PAGE 253. Rescored from 5 to 3 on 23 Aug 2026.
What was checked and not found
A claim that one board does something and the others do not is only as good as the search that failed to find it elsewhere. These are those searches.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chemistry 10
Ratio 0.06 — 0.1 feminine tokens per 1,000 words across 55,101 words. No named woman scientist.
Limits
A counter-intuitive corollary: the only three women credited as authors anywhere sit in KP's English readers — the board scoring worst on every other gender measure — because its older anthology-based syllabus admits them incidentally, where newer commissioned books admit women only as subjects.
Boards and confidence
PunjabSindhKhyber Pakhtunkhwa high confidence
Confidence reflects the evidence tier this rests on. High means native or English-medium text verified by exact string match; medium means it depends partly on Urdu-medium material read at theme grade, or on an absence. See the method.
Source
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chemistry 10, 'New Edition', scan 2021 edition; Sindh General Science 8, portal-listed edition; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chemistry 9, 2019-20 edition; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Physics 10, scan 2021 edition — PDF p. 244
Cite this finding
Textbook Evidence Project, “No woman appears as an agent of knowledge anywhere in the corpus”. Evidence from 4 textbooks (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh). Corpus version 210 records. Retrieved from https://textbookevidence.com/findings/no-women-agents/
Two citations are appropriate here, not one. The line above cites this finding. If you are quoting the textbook passage itself, cite the book — its full bibliographic record, edition and approval reference is on its own page, linked from each evidence entry above — and say that you found it here.
Challenge this finding
This is a claim about a printed book, so it is checkable, and it should be checked. If the citation is wrong, the edition is misidentified, the passage is quoted unfairly, or the finding does not survive its own evidence, that is worth reporting and it will be acted on whether or not the correction is convenient for the argument. Corrections are logged publicly in the corrections log; this applies fully to the boards themselves.