> I've seen it argued that, paradoxically, the richer and more egalitarian a society is,

The former-Communist East-European country I lived in as a kid was a lot more egalitarian than most of present-day Western countries and the women were treated pretty much the same as men were when it came to work. I remember as a kid that I regarded my mother going each morning to work and returning in the evening as a very normal thing, and I regarded the few kids' mothers who weren't doing that as being lazy (to this day I still think that a stay-at-home parent is a lazy human being).

State-run kindergartens were also of much help for women back then.

> The former-Communist East-European country I lived in as a kid was a lot more egalitarian than most of present-day Western countries

That really depends on how you measure gender equality and general freedom though.

> to this day I still think that a stay-at-home parent is a lazy human being

You're just being too judgemental though. If a family is wanting for nothing and they agree that one parent should stay at home to spend more time looking after the family, why not?

> That really depends on how you measure gender equality and general freedom though.

Like I said, gender equality was pretty well established. "General freedom" doesn't have that much in common with equality, we can all be equal but not free. I'd say that for further reading on the matter Mona Ozouf's essays on "liberté, égalité, fraternité" is a good starting point (a related article about it in French: http://www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/mona-ozouf-pas-simple-de...)

> You're just being too judgemental though. If a family is wanting for nothing and they agree that one parent should stay at home to spend more time looking after the family, why not?

I know this point-view might be seen as judgemental, it's just that I see people not contributing back to society with their work-time as not giving it all. It's not a matter of money, I am a little marxist inside me and I do believe that work it's one of the things that define us as a species. I've heard my ~84-year-old peasant grandma' saying that she was very upset that her legs were hurting her because she wanted to continue working.

>I know this point-view might be seen as judgemental,

It is judgmental.

>it's just that I see people not contributing back to society with their work-time as not giving it all

Child-rearing has societal benefits. It's one of the key reasons why children from two parent-households do significantly better on average than children from one. Either they get the benefit of dual income or a full-time parent.

>I've heard my ~84-year-old peasant grandma' saying that she was very upset that her legs were hurting her because she wanted to continue working

I believe that but it's a choice.

> Child-rearing has societal benefits. It's one of the key reasons why children from two parent-households do significantly better on average than children from one. Either they get the benefit of dual income or a full-time parent.

Link to studies on that? And I mean comprehensive studies, not the ones limited to the US.

They won't be able to provide, because it turns out the differences basically evaporate when you control for the financial stability of the households. It's just that one-parent households (especially in the US) tend to be a hell of a lot less financially stable than two-parent households.

Your last paragraph, I feel, is focusing too much on the individual, direct contribution and ignoring the effect a person staying at home can have on their family. By taking care of their auxilliary needs and letting them focus on their core tasks (work, school, etc.), the increase in productivity of the family as a whole can exceed that of a direct individual's contribution. I think of it as a project manager for the family - they don't directly contribute to the development of a project, but they handle the overhead that would otherwise thrash their developers.

Well the idea of a stay at home parent is that child care is work. You can either pay someone or do it yourself, in which case you're doing the job you would have paid someone else to do.

You could not have given a better explanation of why I would never want to live in a marxist society if you tried.

> The former-Communist East-European country I lived in as a kid was a lot more egalitarian than most of present-day Western countries and the women were treated pretty much the same as men were when it came to work.

This. Soviet block was also mostly atheist, which affected this egalitarianism positively as well (and opposite in places like the US). This still largely remains, even with Orthodox Church reemerging and realigning with the government (at least in Russia).

>to this day I still think that a stay-at-home parent is a lazy human being

I'm not sure why it's lazy to avoid work if it doesn't negatively affect your health or well-being. I can't say what the objective meaning of life is (or if one even exists for certain) but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it isn't to "grow up, work for decades, and die." Nothing gold can stay.

> but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it isn't to "grow up, work for decades, and die."

I've also said it in a previous comment, but my ~84-or-so peasant grandma' did just that, i.e. she worked all of her life ever since she got married at 17, never took a "vacation" day off. I've heard her saying that she was really upset that her legs were hurting her, because she really wanted to continue working as she had done before. I'm pretty sure that, if given the chance, my gradnma' would choose the same lifestyle as she had. For some of us work is indeed fulfilling.

Have you considered the possibility that she kept herself occupied as a way to avoid uncomfortable dilemmas like the one I posed above? As virtuous as hard work may be, vain work is not. Dealing with difficult questions is the only way to know whether or not the life we lead is as full as it can be. We can certainly close ourselves off to difficult questions and enjoy what we have, but why would we intentionally waste the opportunity to rise above that if we can?

For some, sure, but there is a argument to be made that it's really about time that we decouple work and income. If I didn't have to work to get an income I sure would work with something quite different, more artistic, instead of reinventing the wheel for the fourth time even though I know this code will not be used for anything usefull anyway.

Conversely to that, maybe people who work when they don't need to are just chumps.

Lots of this.

It's not only Russia, either, which I find to be a bizarre point of focus here. I find female colleagues are far more likely to be from India, China, or Taiwan than any western nation.

Yes I can confirm this too. From our brief conversations, most of them didnt enjoy it but do it for the money (like me).

>> It's not only Russia, either, which I find to be a bizarre point of focus here. I find female colleagues are far more likely to be from India, China, or Taiwan than any western nation.

Where are you currently based? In the UK (and this is a BBC article) I don't see many (or any really) female tech workers from the countries you mention but lots from Russia and easter Europe.

Not the parent but I have worked for half a dozen tech companies around the US and they're mostly Indian/Chinese/White.

Thanks, I would have assumed that (and wasn't disputing it). I was just trying to point out to the parent that his experience may not apply everywhere and considering it's a BBC article the UK perspective might be useful to understand why their focus is Russia and not those other nations.

> It's not only Russia, either, which I find to be a bizarre point of focus here

That's still repercussions of calling Russia the whole USSR.

Now most post-Soviet republic are kind of shadowed.

I think it makes sense, if you want to have a good life you will want a good education(my parents always told me if I do not learn then they would send me to take care of sheeps/cows I am from Romania)) so parents and children are aware that education means more money, We have differences here too, from my experience 10 years ago, there were more girls in literature then boys, more boys in computers , and in MAthematics where I was were 75% girls.

Large part of the paradox can likely be explained by the small preferences thats derived from gender identity, and the correlation to the number of opportunities available to the individual.

For example, if a person choose from two similar professions with similar pay but where one is dominated by ones own gender and the other isn't, then I predict that a above 50% will chose the one which employ a majority of ones own gender. However if there is only a few professions that is high paying and a lot of unemployment in other areas, and many people live in poverty, then gender will be less of a factor in the decision.

I think that's reasonable. If there is an equality of opportunity, then choices will magnify existing differences. If you have equal access to A or B, but there is some minor property of A that makes it a little more attractive to a certain demographic, over a large population sample, you should see large scale differences.

Given that populations of humans will naturally self-organize themselves into groups (whether based on race, culture, music choices, geographic birth, language, etc), the expected outcome is almost never going to be perfect representation. I don't think black people are genetically predisposed for basketball, just like latinos are not genetically predisposed for baseball, and yet the respective demographics are over-represented in NBA and MLB respectively.

Not only is it unlikely to be perfect representation, but it can be quite extreme when the choices are done at a later time in life.

For example, the teacher profession is generally female dominated at 80%, but gender segregation becomes even worse when a teacher finish studying and chooses a specialization. Language teachers are above 90% female, while music is 80% male. There is no innate reason why the language of music and the language of text has this difference, but over time it just have been that more women choses languages and more men choosing music when picking a subject to teach. This trend that people has a tendency pick places (especially within a profession) where ones own gender is majority was given as one of the primary theories in a government report on the subject a few years ago here in Sweden.

I see it as the best theory available to explain the data and general trend for gender segregation.

> I've seen it argued that, paradoxically, the richer and more egalitarian a society is, the more the differences are magnified in the kinds choices individuals of both genders make.

There's absolutely nothing paradoxical about this. The more wealthy a society is, the less incentive there is for women to work instead of being the primary full-time caretaker. Women are happier in single-earner households where they don't have to work or can work part-time at their leisure. This usually means they chose the right partner, e.g. a high status male that lets them survive on 1 income (presumably high).

Beware the cognitive dissonance that liberals are so intent on perpetuating that empowering women has anything to do with the workplace. It doesn't.

This is incredibly misogynist and unfortunately par for the course around here.

There's also a pattern where differences in average personality are larger in more gender-egalitarian societies which might be an alternate explanation.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijop.12265/abstra...

Well, the argument comes from the fact that the most gender equal countries still have very high level of men and women assuming traditional gender roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

And we are not sure what that is.

I think the more time goes on, the more the idea of gender roles being 100% socially constructed seems untenable. It would make sense in a world where human being are purely rational agents, but we still carry the baggage of evolution and having to survive in nature. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that some of the specialist selections (including psychological) that have evolved into men and women would persist in modern times.

While it's certainly not unreasonable, the fact that current societies - even very equal ones - show gender roles is hardly good evidence, or makes the social construction theory untenable. All of our societies are also a continuum stretching for millennia, so it's very hard to say what a truly equal society looks like, let alone predict how people would behave in it.

>the fact that current societies - even very equal ones - show gender roles is hardly good evidence, or makes the social construction theory untenable.

Gender roles is what you would expect from a species that developed distinct genders. For example, the simple fact that hormone levels are different between genders, should strongly imply differences in behaviour which should bleed into day to day choices. The fact that one gender specializes with birth, while the other with insemination would strongly imply this difference would in some way segregate genders within a developing culture, and so on.

So I cannot imagine how the "social construction theory" could possibly be correct.

"strongly imply" - exactly. It certainly implies. It certainly seems the more likely explanation. What I'm saying is that there's a big leap from "strong imply not X" to "X not possibly correct".

Can't we use peer-reviewed studies instead of entertainment? I really feel like you're not doing your position justice...

It would help if you had a source, but it could be because richer countries can afford to be inefficient and irrational and divide people into gender roles.

That argument doesn't hold though in many traditionally poor conservative religious countries -- think Pakistan, Bangladesh, or poorer Catholic countries in Latin America.

I think religion/culture plays a bigger role. Russia was largely atheist and mostly remains so.

Yea. It might even be happening in the us. I still can't believe this slate article that says Millenials want more traditional gender roles.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/03/31/millennials_...

It is possible you see better representation of both genders in a society where people choose their career based on potential ROI. Fewer societies allow its people to truly choose their career based on interest or passion alone, which might be where you see larger differences in gender representation.

However, that brings up the politically incorrect argument that men are more interested in Tech than women, which seems hard to justify as well.

>It is possible you see better representation of both genders in a society where people choose their career based on potential ROI.

The world would be a drastically different place if people were rational.

That's too simplistic.

While individual people need not be rational, a better theory is that society as a whole is largely rational when taking into account disruptions due to causal factors (people, groups, situations). These causal factors need not be rational, and the extent to which society allows these causal factors to influence it determines how far it deviates from rational behaviour.

I'd rather see it cited in a peer-reviewed study.