[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.