HN Explorer

Ask HN: Eastern Europe and STEM has more women than Western Europe?

17 points by mettamage ↗ HN
I'm trying to look for articles about women in STEM and Eastern Europe. I read on HN once that the approach of the Soviet Union in particular has something to do with it. So history plays a role?

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).

27 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] thread
unity1001
> So history plays a role?

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.

badpun
> 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'

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.

unity1001
Nope. Despite there have been division of labor and traditions historically, semitic religions - foremost Christianity - are what codified the 'lower status' of women, including how they were beneath men, or even 'sinful and dangerous'. You have no idea how it was during the middle ages until Cathars, despite having been persecuted and massacred, have changed the perception of women to the 'bad' state that we later knew. Before Cathars, it was much worse.
GoldenMonkey
Interesting viewpoint considering that Christianity was the only religion one could join without tribal, ethnic or blood ties. The only religion open and accepting of others at the time. And even women had equal standing before God.

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.

thrown_22
What's missing from the cultural explanation is the free universal child care that everyone got and the quotas of equal genders in all professions.

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.

somedude895
The effect is much more pronounced in Arab countries than in ex USSR countries, so this is definitely not it.
unity1001
Nope. That's it - the effect in USSR is society wide. Its an entire retooling of culture. In Arab countries, there has been some effort in the same direction by the socialist governments of 1950s and 1960s. Those did some effect, but they were not as profound as USSR's cultural impact. Today the upper classes of Arab societies send their daughters to STEM schools for economic reasons and for the prestige that those fields gained during that period.
Veuxdo
Probably relevant: "A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions" [0]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

bismuthcrystal
The social experiment backfires one again. You can't fight nature. Fight nature and you will lose 100% of the time.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Bakary
How would you define nature? Anatomically modern humans are 300K years old. Recorded history is 6K years old. Computer-science degrees have been around for less than a person's average lifetime. What is natural about what we are discussing, and what is the natural expectation to have?
bismuthcrystal
The natural expectation to have is that males and females are different, have been different since 300K years ago (and even longer than that), and have been described as being different in the last 6K years of man made records. Try to change this nature by policy, or any other artificial incentive, and it will fail.

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.

brtkdotse
> It is just nature.

No, its just an anecdote. You even said it yourself.

bismuthcrystal
The world is so eager to enlighten us but we choose the path of ignorance. How many anecdotes you require to be enlightened? Or are you a peer review person, that will only see light by the eyes of others? Tell me, of what use is peer review when you are alone?
Bakary
Ok but we have to be more precise than that. In what way are they different? And how does this evopsych account for something as unnatural to hunter gatherers as STEM education? And if policies and incentives don't work, why did the Soviet Union have many more women pursuing scientific topics?

More rigor is needed, otherwise we can justify aand handwave away anything at all just with anecdotes or vague evopsych references

hulitu
> In countries that empower women

Empower women to be princesses or what ?

dimitar
In BG and the USSR there used to be quotas and also less choice over what to study, so about 50% of STEM students were women. When I studied in BG the quotas were long gone and 20 out of 160 students in our engineering specialty were women. Girls greatly outperform boys in Maths at school, but tend to choose non-STEM degrees nowadays.

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).

rowanG077
Do you have a source I could read about girls greatly outperforming boys in Maths at school? I did think girls outperform boys. But that was across almost the whole board and the effect wasn't what I would call great.
yieldcrv
Another aspect you need to look at is why groups in the west wants women in STEM:

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.

logicalmonster
> Another aspect you need to look at is why groups in the west wants women in STEM: 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.)

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.

yieldcrv
Really depends on who is pushing for women in STEM. At this point it is some people's entire identities and they haven't stepped back to ask why they want that outcome in a long time.
drakonka
All I have is personal anecdotes as an Eastern European woman in STEM. Both my parents were engineers. Father a marine engineer. Mother was an early days programmer in the days of punch cards, and also told stories of working as a researcher with some kind of vacuum technology in university. I have vivid memories of her bringing home stacks and stacks of used punch cards so that I could use them as scrap paper to draw in the margins (blank paper was valued and used only for "proper" illustration attempts; sketching and doodling was done on punch cards or in margins of old newspapers).

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.

logicalmonster
We all choose different careers for many different reasons, but the 2 biggest ones are probably these...

> 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.