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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

I could be wrong but the sonograms and abortions are also just a side effect. The real problem is that neither place puts much importance on gender equality. Women have even less opportunities than men over there, compared to the West. That said, things have improved and continue to improve though the pace is really slow

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Gender equality in China is much better after decades of the one child policy. Businessmen who would have raised their sons to take their place raised their daughters that way with no sons.

I work with powerful Chinese businesswomen and they are no nonsense tough customers. They also do not have any of the delicate mixing of sexuality and asexuality that American businesswomen need to strike - the Chinese women are all business all the time.

Did you see the recent group photo of the 19th Congress, with apparently zero women?

That's skewed by the fact that Xi is the first Chinese leader to be born after the establishment of the PRC.

So you won't see any product of the one child policy begun in 1979. It will be quite some time as CCP leaders tend to run on the old side of things.

Assuming that there are about 2 million Chinese who are millionaires or higher, your annecdote only affects up to 0.11602610587% of the population

I was under the impression that gender equality in Chinese society is much better than the west in some respects, espescially the amount of women in STEM.

In some aspects China is more sexist towards women: - girls are still less desirable simply because their children do not carry the last name - people still believe older women = less value whereas older men = more value - women who aren't married by 30 are considered "leftovers"

But in some areas less sexist than western society - you don't take your husband's last name when you marry - you're not expected to quit your job and become a housewife when you have children - girls are expected to be good at math, science and engineering just as much as boys

I think it is quite easy to imagine a sexist society where that particular manifestation of sex difference doesn't exist but others do.

You have the correlation backwards, believe it or not.

Great writing, lots of sources, in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

> Do we find that “countries that lack gender equity in school enrollment” and “stereotypes associating science with males” have fewer women in tech?

> No. Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality.

> Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures:

>> Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637).

> In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.

As far as what I heard is that in cultures where a woman can choose watch she wants to do, most will not choose tech.

Whereas, in countries where women are expected to do what society wants them to do, they are forced into tech because that is where the money is, and is how they can best help feed their families.

"[Chinese] Tech companies also often tout the attractive women they’ve hired as incentives for more men to come on board, according to the HRW report. Both Tencent and Baidu were noted to have posted to their social media accounts interviews with male employees who cited having beautiful women around them as an incentive for working there"

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/23/17272620/chinese-tech-com...

Let's not forget the gender pay gap, which imo is the main culprit

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014759671...

"In contrast to the United States and European countries, China has witnessed a widening gender pay gap in the past two decades."

China is a still a very patriarchal society. Much more so than the US or EU.

I got that sense as well. I don't have numbers to back it up, but in grad school and where I currently work, there were very few women, yet it seemed like the ratio of Chinese men to Chinese women was closer to equal than the overall ratio of men to women.

In business, too -- there are proportionately more female billionaires.

I think you’re both right. Placing less value on baby girls and allowing people to kill their baby girls are together causing there to be less baby girls.

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