[abenedic]

So I am not Bulgarian, and not currently in that hemisphere. That said I feel as though this is unfair to many in the ex-Soviet blok countries. There was a push in many to force equality of the genders, which may or may not have been misguided. One of my Maths professors who was very influential to me, was from that region and that time. I thank everyday that she was in a country and position to learn that. Otherwise I would be unemployed like my brother.

[close04]

The "push" was quite simple: they wanted people who could do the job and the gender was very far down the list of requirements. Technical universities were full of female soon-to-be engineers because there was nobody to tell them it's not a woman's job. These were among the relatively few well paid jobs so everybody would go for them. And women were expected to work just as men did since one income per family wouldn't be enough. There was never a time in the recent history of those countries when women were expected to stay at home (more than the maternity leave) or have menial jobs so there was no reason to have that imbalance. This is seen pretty clearly in the gender pay gap for some of those countries [0] and the average number of women working in science and tech [1].

Today on average you can make just as much money in PR as in engineering. Since the choice is much wider now it's easier to fall prey to that "not a job for a woman" BS. I can assure you if an engineering job became one of the few ways to escape poverty the balance would quickly shift towards neutral.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[nadezhda18]

all this did not make a woman equal to a man unfortunately

as a female dev who started her career in Russia about 15 years ago and whose mother was also a dev programming aviation radars, I can tell there was a he-e-ell of sexism and predjudice against women in the society back then, despite all these pretty numbers.

Collapse of the USSR opened up huge opportunities for discrimination and I still remember the job ads for devs where it was explicitly specified "men only" :( I was a subject of sexism, my mom was a subject of sexism.

(there is even more sexism in the modern Rusian society but we are not talking about the modern days)

[GreenToad5]

This is interesting... So the government forcing "equality" was artificial then. People's hearts and minds hadn't changed. I would suggest that forcing solutions on people like equality of outcome are not actually solutions, but mere short sighted illusions. Once the balance of power changes to another group (as it inevitably has throughout history) the smoke and mirrors fade away and the society is left with the original problem, if not and exacerbated one. Now we have bitterness and grudges on both sides and worse relations than before. When I look at history, and then I look at many of today's social justice warriors, I don't have much hope that their methods are going to an actual net positive for either side in the long run. If there is any permanent change, what permanent damage will also be left on the society as a whole. This is not something that is easy to predict and as such is dangerous. Division is growing. Any society throughout history who have had ideologies forced on them have inevitably fought back en mass. Tribalism to this type of stimulus is inherent in humans. The only effective and lasting change that I have witnessed when studying history has been though discourse and discussion (two thing which are being suppressed today). Healthy and respectful discourse leads to concessions and increased empathy on both sides. Opposing enemies become humans to each other, deserving of respect and consideration. Disrespectfully ridiculing the other side's views with blanket classifications meant to silence and discredit the opposition's credibility (and humanity) are far too common today and will only serve to divide further.

[int_19h]

The big problem in USSR specifically (I can't speak for other Sovbloc countries) was that the messaging was never consistent. Early revolutionary period was very heavy on gender equality, and very sincere. But under Stalin, there was a big reversal towards "traditional family" and all that stuff, largely to encourage rapid population growth - so they banned abortions, for example.

After that, it was some weird state in the middle - for example, in my mother's time, abortions were not banned in the USSR, but they were heavily discouraged and socially shunned. For another example, conscription was always all-male. In general, it was accepted that some jobs are just "male jobs"; e.g. Soviets had a token female cosmonaut in Tereshkova and later in Savistkaya, but overall the space program was a blatant sausage fest.

I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if the original revolutionary message of gender equality was never reversed or diluted, and lasted at full strength long enough that there was at least one generation growing up without seeing anything else.

[doombolt]

The pay for engineering was actually quite poor in Soviet block. If money were what you wanted, you'll go into coal mining.

Sadly, most of those to-be-engineers of both genders will find themself sitting 9-to-5 doing nothing useful, and then their jobs will evaporate as socialism fails.

[close04]

> as socialism fails

You mean "as communism failed". I wasn't talking about the Soviet bloc as it is today but the former "USSR-aligned" countries like those referenced in this article (countries like Bulgaria or Romania) during communist times. They were and still are in that region of prosperity where they could never afford to have a single income earner in the family so pragmatism led to a more uniform development path for both men and women alike. So in those communist times they pumped out tens of thousands of qualified engineers with no regard to their gender. And while some of the opportunities they had in their home countries may have dried out over the past few decades that "legacy" of not caring about gender means today's Europe is full of such "eastern" male and female engineers doing everything from writing software for your bank to designing the suspension of your car. There may be countries that "import" more skilled female engineers than they bother to produce internally.

Probably for the same reason prosperous countries like Switzerland, Germany, UK, or Austria pay their women ~20% less than the men.

If you work in IT and have any kind of contact with teams outsourced in Eastern Europe you probably already noticed that you're just as likely to deal with qualified women as with qualified men.

As for coal mining every single piece of literature I've come across about that period mentions low wages, no paid overtime, 7 day work week, pay cuts for not meeting production quotas, poor living conditions, "shortened" lifespan, etc. That's a far cry from the engineers working to build cars like Bulgarrenault, Bulgaralpine, Pirin-FIAT, Chavdar, and whatever else they were manufacturing at the time.

Full disclosure: I am not Bulgarian and never lived there.

[int_19h]

USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and it never called itself communist. Communism was supposed to be the utopian society that was always just around the corner. As the Soviet joke goes:

"We are told that the communism is already seen at the horizon. What then is a horizon? "

"Horizon is an imaginary line which moves away each time you approach it."

The party was a Communist Party, yes - as in, a party of communists. And communists would be people who believed that communism is possible and desirable (indeed, within Marxist-Leninist philosophy, it was deemed historically inevitable - the only question was, how soon), and so made efforts to advance society towards it.

As far as coal miners, I can't speak for Bulgaria, but it's very well known that physical work paid significantly more than any intellectual work in late USSR (roughly 1960-...) - that was part of the whole "dictatorship of the proletariat" arrangement, as it was interpreted by the official ideology. In 1980s, a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer would be getting 120-200 rubles per month, while a factory worker or a miner would be getting 200-600 rubles, depending on qualification and working conditions. Workers could make even more by signing up to work in adverse conditions (northern polar regions, for example) where the salary would be multiplied by coefficients reflecting that adversity. In factories, it was not uncommon for the workers to get 2x of what their supervising engineer did.

[close04]

And China calls itself democratic. So did the GDR. Socialism is just an economic system. It becomes communism when it's controlled by a single ruling power: the communist party. So communism is the combination of political ideology controlling the socialist economy.

There's no point in getting into semantics, the USSR and the "aligned" countries (all of which put Socialist or Republic in their names) were very much communist countries even if they didn't achieve the ideal textbook communism. Just like there's no textbook example of a free market.

I said the fall of communism because it encompasses both the political and economic systems. And the communist ideology might have played a big role on gender equality.

[int_19h]

> Socialism is just an economic system. It becomes communism when it's controlled by a single ruling power: the communist party. So communism is the combination of political ideology controlling the socialist economy.

Your definition of communism seems to be out of nowhere. I would dare say that the people who first introduced the word, get to define what it means. It can gradually evolve from there (as "democracy" did), but what you suggest is throwing it away entirely and replacing it with something completely different, which is unnecessarily confusing.

In its proper meaning, communism means an Utopian society. That was there in the original definition, very explicitly: per Marx, communism is "classless" and therefore "stateless". If you redefine communism to be something else, how do you describe what USSR was ostensibly trying to achieve? "More communism"? - but that doesn't make sense, because there was supposed to be a qualitative difference between socialism and communism; it wasn't just a matter of "becoming more communist" over time - it was always meant to be something like a state transition.

And you don't need to arbitrarily redefine that word to describe USSR, China etc. It can be perfectly well described as "authoritarian socialism", just as USA can be described as "democratic capitalism", and, say, Franco's Spain as "authoritarian capitalism". Either way, these are two different axes - there's no need to conflate it. Furthermore, "socialism" describes the economic reality in the USSR quite well, so it's not at all the same as "democratic" in DPRK etc.

[antt]

I am Bulgarian.

The "push for gender equality" under communism is largely misunderstood, and purposefully so, in the West.

As an example the entrance exams for primary school teachers were more competitive than the exams for any of the hard sciences or any type of engineering.

My mother failed her teaching exam, yet was accepted into the Naval Academy, a cross between MIT and West Point.

Those women who would have had the prestige of being teachers, the relatively high salaries, the early retirement and a whole host of other benefits lost them during the transition to the point that today being a teacher is one of the worst possible jobs. So now they are moving to tech, their second or third choices under Communism.

[abenedic]

Thank you for commenting, I have not lived in a way to understand the tradeoffs. I do not mean to miss understand. Where I am from I worked with many women in tech, who all graduated from technical universities. I do not know. I hear a lot about how in the west women are dissuaded from tech. I do not know.