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.