I still remember how I did not get jokes about inferiority of girls when we emigrated to Western Germany - I simply had never ever heard one before.
What speaks against your theory is that men died on all sides in WWII, but in the West (read: democratic societies), women's rights developed in a distinctively different/slower way.
PS: Yes, it was not all rosy, childcare was dual-use, it was also used for indoctrination of the youngest and even to some degree to control/check on the parents.
EDIT: It's probably revealing that my initial impulse is to consider this story as irrelevant because it focuses on the gender. Yes, after 26 years in the West I understand why it is relevant.
I grew up in a very communist country, where the gender didn't matter, men and women were expected to be treated equally. The misoginism was barely noticeable. Salary didn't pay attention to sex, were really equally paid.
Leter I emmigrated in Germany. I was tottaly surprised how misoginist the society here is. So much, that there are laws that enforce the equality between man and woman. This is now so much tilted towards women, that man are most of the time suppressed, just because they are men. This is also not healthy, but, hey, we lived in matriarchy before, so we will survive just as well.
So a lot of the gender roles of the West were basically obliterated, i.e. there was no real stay-at-home mother in the GDR, all mothers were working mothers. Seems to fit your experience, and the GP as well.
(And in any case, the range of cars available was much more compressed. Thus there was less differentiation at the high range.)
The big brass were driving Volvos. They were nice cars, but Sweden was seen as sufficiently neutral and socialist-like.
Is this gender equality? It sounds, and it may just be because you simplified it to fit into a single line, that the men were still having to impress the women. Wouldn't gender equality have been the end of there being a set gender having to impress the other?
There is something to it. In the soviet era, those three girls would have been praised for their success and presented as a proof that the world (or at least the commie world :)) is a fair place where everybody can succeed with enough determination and work. This was intended to send the message that women are expected and welcome members of the workforce and made for a reasonably sane atmosphere.
OTOH, the author here starts with complaining how the world isn't fair, despite having a counterexample at hand, and then follows with bitching about Y chromosomes and discrimination before even naming those girls. WTF. I certainly wouldn't want to go into environment where nobody cares about my work and I'm basically a tool used by sad people to make others feel sad.
>men died on all sides in WWII
I'm not sure if you're aware of how far the scale of deaths in the Soviet Union exceeded any Western country - East Germany was probably close, which is an interesting correlation: were there any communist countries without major gender imbalances?
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_Lands_in_World_War_II
Women did work. But we had few women in management and leadership positions.
The Soviet Union had by far the MOST male casualties of any side in the war. 30 MILLION people died, far more than anywhere else.
https://www.rt.com/news/265603-ww2-losses-interactive-video/