I can only speak for Tunisia but the reason women go into STEM is purely economical. STEM jobs pay the most.

The way I see it, a lack of women in STEM is a symptom of a healthy economy, who wouldn't want to not deal with spaghetti code if money was not an issue?

> The way I see it, a lack of women in STEM is a symptom of a healthy economy

Exactly. What is observable in Japan, where a decent job can still provide for a whole family, is that more than half of women choose to be stay-at-home mom. This is not a plot of "the Patriarchy" but something that make sense for them.

On the other side, the current trend in the West to promote women and foreigner work under the diversity meme could be reasonably interpreted as scheme from the big companies to lower wages even further.

is that the entire story? there is a pole every year whether a man could handle having a woman as a boss. In Japan it's still 70-80% say "no". Many Japanese women might choose to stay home but many effectively have few other choices

more anecdata: a Japanese friend of mine moved back to Japan (Tokyo) after 10 years in the states to raise her 2 kids. She tried to get a job and was told "go home and take care of your kids" by several companies. She moved back to the USA after realizing how much she no longer belongs.

note I've heard the idea the as a society gets more prosperous women seem to choose less STEM options. That might be true but I don't think Japan is a good example.

Maybe China?

This is quite a well established phenomenon, which highlights that a lot of gender gaps in developed countries really just comes down to choices that people make knowingly and freely.

> Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees rose with increases in national gender equality

> A mediation analysis suggested that life-quality pressures in less gender-equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761774171...

Japan might not be a great example, but the Nordic countries are.

I guess the issue for those japanese companies was not that they don't want women, or think that women should only be moms. It's that she was indeed a mom that had to take care of their kids (I assume since you didn't mention any stay-at-home partner). In that situation she was not able to wageslave her life away for the company.

Are you saying they didn't want to burden a mother with an awful job?

Not that they didn't want but that they couldn't. If your employee got kids to look after, they won't realistically stay in the office for unnecessary extra hours.

That must be one of the worst cases of confusing correlation with causation that I've ever seen.

> There are, at all times, a number of unattached young ladies in your office. Most of them choose to quit right about when they get married or have children.

> You might imagine that you heard a supervisor tell a young lady in the office “Hey, you’re 30 and aging out of the marriage market, plus I hear you’re dating someone who is not one of my employees, so you might want to think about moving on soon.”, but that would be radioactively illegal, since Japanese employment discrimination laws are approximately equivalent to those in the US. A first-rate Japanese company would certainly never do anything illegal, and a proper Japanese salaryman would never bring his company into disrepute by saying obviously untrue things like the company is systematically engaged in illegal practices. So your ears must be deceiving you. Pesky ears.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...

My feeling is when we talk about diversity and women issues, we often talk about executive job, or job with high salary / some influence on the society (like well payed job in tech). In those cases this is not about lowering wages. This is about performance and ethic.

To farther your point, Jordan Peterson mentions studies in Scandinavia that show that the more equality is given to both genders to pursue their interests, the farther apart they drift. Women tended to go into fields such as nursing, teaching, more people oriented fields, whereas men ended up going into more traditional male fields like STEM.

Far leftists and neo-feminists don't like this of course because it doesn't sit with their narrative that "the patriarchy" is the cause of everything today they don't agree with.

If it was just about pay, surely the incentive would work on boys just as much as girls?

I think the idea is that STEM attainment confers social status, and in cultures with low gender equality it's one of the few ways girls can gain social status independently of men. They can then leverage that status to gain economic and other freedoms.

Boys on the other hand have other ways available to them to gain economic advantage, which are not easily available to girls in those societies.

Lol @ stem conferring social status. Most stem is just desk work. Its not some romantic mars mission for 99.999% of even the best engineers. The only thing buying status is the paycheck. Money empowers women. Its that simple.

Uh, an engineering degree from a good school confers plenty of status in some of the countries we are duscussing, in which teens stop socializing their last year of high school to prepare for college entrance exams

And we can be similarly reductive about any profession. Lawyers are just paper pushers, academics are glorified grant Chasers, and so on

- If it was just about pay, surely the incentive would work on boys just as much as girls?

That's the question basically. Would it :)? One side says it would the other says that genders are statistically different.

- Boys on the other hand have other ways available to them to gain economic advantage

I don't know about them. Sure, the 0.1% of them can be politicians / CEOs, but it's not "available" for people in general ( it requires a very specific personality IMHO ). I don't think 10-20-30% differences could be explained by this small portion. For most men gaining economic advantage _is_ about getting a good job, and that's the only option.

>- Boys on the other hand have other ways available to >them to gain economic advantage > >I don't know about them. Sure, the 0.1% of them can be >politicians / CEOs, but it's not "available" for people >in general

In many of these countries there are a huge variety of jobs that are not available to women, because their ability to interact with men who are strangers is highly restricted. So most commercial, industrial and many administrative roles are not available, because they would involve often meeting 'random' men. In some of the countries, women can't even serve men in shops.

That cuts it down to basically office jobs or educational institutions where the men around you are a stable restricted group, that it's possible to gain social acceptance for, or jobs involving meeting men in highly controlled situations.

Even then, for many administrative roles in these cultures jobs are obtained through contacts and private arrangements rather than through an open jobs market. Again that's largely not available to women because these networks are almost entirely male and again lack of ability to associate freely with men closes them off.

STEM is different because it's jobs are only available to people with specific, quantifiable qualifications and skill the possession of which is an objective fact, verifiable through credentials. That's where the status comes from. Social networks and personal opinions of suitability aren't good enough for employers to fill all the roles they have open, so they have to look to a wider jobs market. They can't afford to close those roles to half or more of the available work force, so they have to make arrangements to suit women's working conditions or lose out on skilled candidates.

Mu impression is that gender roles are essentially luxury consumption. In rich countries your lifestyle will always be at least ok, so yo can afford to care that your career is manly/womanly enough. In poorer countries you don't say no to education that will greatly improve your lifestyle.

Another interesting point from that paper:

"Paradoxically, boys’ overestimation of their competence in science was larger in countries with higher Global Gender Gap Index scores."

That is, the lower the gender gap, the more boys overestimate their science skill.

Iranian women have been historically been very well-educated, and this predates the Islamic republic. They've been churning out lots of female engineers and physicians for some time. I know women well into their 70s who are graduates of med school in Tehran and practicing in the US for e.g.

I'm not sure how you can hypothesize these things without any historical and cultural context

Tidbit I read years ago is that in unequal societies young middle and upper class women often enter university to avoid expectations of marriage by continuing to go to school. Longer you put it off the more power you have.