They don't if you mean STEM and emancipation, quite the opposite, actually (compared to West Germany).

In addition to the points of sibling comments, their respective starting posititions were drastically different: West Germany got the marshal plan, which benefitted their economy, the East had to pay reparations to the USSR, which meant whole factories, trains, even railroad tracks, all in all amounting to about a third of industrial capacity, were transferred to the USSR.

Without having firm data, I can see a few factors that are different. After the collapse of the GDR, it was easier for eastern Germans to move to west Germany than for Polish to move to a different country in the west. Mostly younger and educated people would have made that move, hampering future generations. With the Reunification also came the whole Treuhand issue which essentially sold off a good chunk of eastern Germany for pennies to western investors, because eastern investors had no capital. That meant the east lost out on the profits from its economy as they would accumulate in the west instead. Even today a large part of east German rentals are owned by western landlords or corporations. Then the industrial base of west Germany was setup far more for competing on the open world market with automotive companies in the NW (VW), SW (Daimler) and SE (BMW) plus the big industrial area Ruhrgebiet. So you naturally got an economic focus even after Reunification on the old BRD with the previous GDR requiring decades to hopefully catch up to the rest of the new country.

Quite a few educated East Germans have become West Germans as soon as they had the opportunity (or moved elsewhere in the world), but East Germany actually has a couple of high-tech 'hotspots' and good universities.

An East German state (Saxony) also consistently has the best education system among German states.

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/201453/umfrag...

In general, East Germany (economically) mostly only does poorly when compared to West Germany, but not to the rest of Europe ;)

I think mostly due to the bungled reunification that was basically an asset-stripping followed by enormous brain drain.

One factor in this may also have been the way the privatization of East Germany was handled. Its often overlooked, but the vehicle for it was called Treuhand[1]. Regardless of whether it was necessary or not or right or wrong, it did basically shift out a large amount of capital assets into West Germany (and still carries this sentiment of "opportunistic theft" today).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...

The headline figure of the article is purchase power (PPP) adjusted. I couldn't find any numbers for east German states where the purchase power adjustment happens per state. Since housing is the largest component and housing costs differ between east and west Germany using a nation wide PPP adjustment factor gives wrong results for individual states.

Incomes in the former GDR are comparable to those of Poland. They still lag behind West Germany, however (as does Poland).

Quite simple. They all left.

MBAs and company owners do not come from stem education.