If anyone knows more about this and has some good quality content on it, I'd appreciate it! :)
I find it hard to find (I typed in multiple search queries on HN but nothing came up).
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
An anecdote: from all the children in my family, not a single girl ever picked the hand powered drill from the toy box and went chasing a piece of wood to victimize. It is just nature.
No, its just an anecdote. You even said it yourself.
More rigor is needed, otherwise we can justify aand handwave away anything at all just with anecdotes or vague evopsych references
Empower women to be princesses or what ?
Culture definitely plays a role. Soviet Union making women totally equal, mandating and promoting equal participation from women in all aspects of life definitely broke the longstanding cultural norms about 'what women should be doing in work life' - most of which came from especially Christian religion traditions.
On top of that, Soviet Union also promoted STEM jobs as a way to move the society into the future. This elevated STEM jobs in prestige and respectability compared to others. So naturally these jobs' standing among women rose as well.
The simple result of this is women being in STEM jobs not only being normal but also desirable in post-Soviet society.
Yep. My grandma worked in a freaking coal mine in the 1940s. There were hardly if any "men only" jobs. It was also necessary because so many men died during the war that, without women's wide participation in labor, the economies would hardly work.
> most of which came from especially Christian religion traditions.
I don't think that's it. Pre-Christianity Europe was the same. It's just a deeply rooted, many millenia-long tradition, very similar as in other agricultural societies BTW.
Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
And that is why the Roman Emperor Constantine, was able to embrace it as Rome’s state religion.
Something no one in the west understands (or will likely believe) was that to be a female primary school teacher required higher grades than to be a female physicist/mathematician/computer scientists.
The reverse was true for men. My mother for example didn't have the grades to go into education but did have the grades to go into electrical engineering/computer science. My father on the other hand only needed a pulse to get into education but had no interest in dealing with other people's snot nosed brats.
For making a lot of money (“upwards mobility”, financial autonomy) and theoretically making products that factor in women/different audiences more. (The latter being new since influential tech companies is also new.)
The heavy focus on money is a difference in values in the west (as the communist countries were not focused on money, at least as the reason women in STEM was normalized) and that money focus isn’t that convincing to all. Specifically trying to push that “the only form of empowerment is by exploiting yourself for a corporation”, when its either not true or doesn’t match what all women either experience or believe and isn't inherently better than other options, just an option. If you look around you’ll see that everyone calls their own form of actions to be empowering even if that action conflicts directly with what a different group calls empowering.
So that money centric approach dilutes the interest in STEM on its own, alongside a dozen other things that dilute STEM participation. Basically you get the wrong people involved, who also notice there are other ways for a comfortable life eventually, with methods that may be more fun, less cognitively challenging, “empowering” enough or empowerment isn't a goal.
My opinion is that I agree that money is the reason, but not in the way you described.
Think about basic supply and demand. What happens if you increase the supply of the workforce? Wages become surpressed.
That is why big tech is gung-ho trying to do everything they can to encourage more women into tech. I don't believe it's some great ethical crusade, I believe they want a bigger pool of employees to keep salaries as low as conceivably possible.
My grandmother was a mathematics teacher. When I meet another Eastern European person in tech, often I hear that their parents were also engineers of some sort (and commonly were in some sort of rock band before deciding to pursue their engineering career full time...)
Unfortunately some comments here about how women were "totally equal" in the Soviet Union paint an overly rosy picture. In practice, this was not the case. Women were not just expected to do the same professional work as men, but to also be responsible for cooking, cleaning, and domestic duties in general in addition to that.
> A - making enough money to live acceptably well
> B - to feel fulfilled and have satisfaction and enjoyment with what we do with our time
Now think about making a career choice when it comes to living in a poor country versus living in a rich country.
If you live in a richer country, you can have a decent standard of living almost no matter what career you put effort into, so reason A isn't as much of a motivator. People in rich countries are much more likely to take advice like "do what you love" and go into lower paid fields like social work, or many art related fields, simply because they love it.
However, if you live in a poorer country, you need to focus on reason A to have an acceptable living standard. Having a job you personally enjoy and feel satisfaction from isn't as important to you as simply having a decent lifestyle first. You're much more likely to tolerate spending your time doing the most boring, monotonous, headache-inducing work that you hate in a poorer country if it means that you have a path to elevate your lifestyle.
I think the introduction of choice in the system greatly impacted the outcome, because many desirable fields were not commonly available (i.e. Socialism planning does not allow for many lawyers and accountants, language study was quite limited, things like International Relations was effectively only for offspring of high-rank party officials).