[kyleschiller]

Yeah, you're absolutely right that by not taking into account things like STEM participating, the metric ignores exactly this kind of thing.

Having said that, if you just want to know how it was literally defined here, I found this comment helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16408092

[dogma1138]

Women in the USSR were common in engineering degrees because many other high skill careers like law, medicine, philosophy and politics weren’t open to them.

Bangladesh isn’t that different and rich families send their daughters to get a degree so they would be more appealing to prospective husbands.

You can’t just pick random statistics and extrapolate data from them the fact is still that the more options women have the less they seem to go for specific fields which includes the engineering part of STEM.

People ignore the fact that many many men chose STEM not because they want too but because it’s expectd it’s the default career path for the new blue/white colar worker.

Myself and everyone else I know went into STEM as a career because it was “easy money” the amount of effort required to get into it is actually fairly low when compared to careers like law or medicine and the payout on average is much better.

That said the career for most people in IT isn’t going to be exactly overly satisfying and fulfilling.

[lowry]

Bullshit right in the first paragraph. Women snipers, women tank drivers, women pilots were not uncommon in USSR during the second world war. Half of the lawyers were women in USSR by 1980, although the comparison to US would be meaningless, the legal profession there is pretty different. Politics and philosophy... Peuh. These are not professions even in US.

[dogma1138]

Sorry that’s not true on both accounts.

Yes the USSR has had women in combat (so did other allied nations, even the US it just didn’t sent them to the front lines) however in very small amounts and mainly for propaganda purposes and while some of them achieved great things as far as anyone can be great in a war these weren’t by any stretch of the imagination the norm.

In the post war economy women were locked out of many positions my mother had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to teach in secondary education being both Jewish and a woman it took her nearly a decade to pass retarded committees and gain enough favors.

While the USSR might have been seen as a “feminist” heaven back in the day it was far from that it was and Russia is still is very old fashioned in some regards closer to 19th century court than to the bra burning days of the 1960s in the West.

And as far as women’s emancipation went it wasn’t as much emancipation as it was exploitation.

Lenin has seen women as part of the workforce and the USSR used them as such but delegated them to the most basic tasks and positions with progression and advancement near impossible regardless of their qualifications and effort.

Education was also seen by many as a way to escape having to work in the factories and fields.

I’m not entirely sure what your experience is with Russian culture and history but it seems we have quite different views of it.

But if you are willing to read then Wikipedia has decent articles about women and feminism in the USSR and I suggest a book called Gender in 20th century USSR.

[tetromino_]

I strongly suspect that your mother's unfortunate experience was 100% caused by official Soviet antisemitism, not by anything about her gender. Post-war Soviet policy was to deny most Jews the right to even study in prestigious universities, to deny them higher degrees for spurious reasons, and exclude them from many research institutions [1] - is it any wonder that your mother found it difficult to obtain a university teaching position?

> While the USSR might have been seen as a “feminist” heaven back in the day it was far from that

Compared to the West at the time, the USSR was feminist. I have talked to several Soviet Jewish women who emigrated to the US in the 1970s. All of them were struck by blatant gender discrimination that was normal in America at the time, but to them seemed like something out of a 19th century novel; for example, needing a husband's permission to open a bank account.

[1] See, for example, https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Антисемитизм_в_советской_матем...

[dogma1138]

It wasn’t just antisemtism it was the fact that women barred from any progression.

Sure in US it might have been oh honey why do you need to work but in the USSR it was much worse it was horrible exploitation under the guise of liberation.

[lowry]

It is a bit too late, but I just stubled upon a mini-series documentary by Leonid Parfenov about Russian Jews. As Parfenov points out, Russian Empire and then Soviet Union and contemporary Russian went over periods of both antisemitism and judophilia. Those interested in the history of Russian Jews should really watch it.