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