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Comment by usrnm | Hacker News Reader

Interesting and sad to see the ratio of women to men doing hard manual work in these photos, even road repairs are done by women. It's mind boggling how devastating the war was for the country.

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The Soviets were one of the few countries where Women were employed on the front lines during the war. They were tank drivers, anti aircraft gunners, pilots, snipers.

A famous unit of all women pilots known as the 'Night Witches' made a name for themselves during the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches

That's a funny take these days, that women are too dainty to do "men's work". Should they be kept barefoot in the kitchen? Or just allowed in women's jobs?

This has nothing to do with gender equality. You don’t see any apparatchik wives on the pictures.

There is exactly one photo with three women pouring something onto small holes? Only other work shown has women going to clear/sweep and cleaning is traditionally female work.

It wasn't just hard manual work. IIRC, for decades the majority of doctors were women.

They still are! According to the WHO [0], in 2020 just under 71% of doctors in Russia were women.

[0] https://gateway.euro.who.int/en/indicators/hlthres_137-of-ph...

Why yes, Vlad, you need to drink less. And of course, lay off the Cubans. But if you're headed to the front, knock yourself out!

Seriously though, we can likely expect that statistic to increase due to the number of dead Russian men who have been meat-ground in the war. Poor bastards.

On that note, DON'T TEACH YOUR CHILDREN NATIONALIST IDEAS. Resist statism.

The 'isms pass. The 'ist dies. Art remains. - Vladimir Nabokov

Ah, is that why... I noticed this too but assumed it was due to some communist ideal of gender equality leading to more women tradespeople, wishful thinking I guess

You saw it in the US during the two world wars. Women got more rights and there was some interesting propaganda encouraging women to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter

Fun fact: The version Normal Rockwell painted shows Rosie stepping on a copy of Mein Kampf. Good times!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RosieTheRiveter.jpg

The poorer the country, the more women work in traditionally male fields. In Bolivia and in Peru, I was surprised to see many women working in construction and driving taxis.

If not for the war or other legitimate reasons I'd assume a preponderance of one demographic doing a specific job as likely a bad thing. I'm surprised it'd be wishful thinking.

From the two pictures I hadn't inferred that it was specifically a preponderance, hence naïveté of my original conclusion

Both. But mostly the war.

I was expecting to find out that lots of men killed in the war led to many more women working after the war, and that's what could be interpreted/guessed from these pictures.

But looking at wikipedia, it's complicated. A lot of different estimates of deaths. I think a lot more men died in ww2 in the Soviet military, from Wikipedia, about 20 million men (see total war deaths by age group table) and 6 million women. The official counts of the dead were supposed to have underreported deaths by a lot.

Looking at different estimates in wiki, about 10 million military dead and almost 20 million civilian dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...

I would suggest that the male deaths will have been concentrated in a smaller age range than the female ones.

You can get more labor out of people if you assume children take 0 time and cost $0.

The war, and also Stalin.

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