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The article totally misses the point. It just picks a single area and wonders why in this particular area women and men are more equal in Russia than in the Wes

The article totally misses the point. It just picks a single area and wonders why in this particular area women and men are more equal in Russia than in the West. By asking such a narrow question you will never get the right answer. The right answer is that in Russia there is more gender equality in general and therefore in every particular area too. For instance, from a women-in-business study it follows that the proportion of female-ocuppied senior management positions in Russia is 47% while in the US it's 23% and in UK it's 19%. https://www.grantthornton.global/en/insights/articles/women-in-business-2017/ https://www.grantthornton.global/en/insights/articles/women-... A quote from it: "Eastern Europe continues to top the rankings (see figure 3), with Russia in the lead as the only country in which every business has a woman on its senior leadership team. In Poland, the proportion of senior roles held by women has improved by six percent to 40%. The region owes some of its strong performance to the legacy of communist principles which have placed women as equals for generations." Of course, such a conclusion goes against the main-stream narrative of communism being all about abuse and human rights violations while the West being the undisputed champion of human rights. So the BBC article just have to provide the following paragraph: "While Russia is doing something right, it's still not there yet in terms of gender parity." What is this about? Nothing. Whatever the subject is BBC must retain some reservations about Russia however unsubstantiated they are.

therpe1 9y ago
Exactly. This article is naive to think there's something special about IT. All the mental gymnastics in the world can't avoid what is a pretty obvious truth: women in Eastern Europe never suffered a lost century of labor prejudice while women in the West did. Since 1917 (and even a bit before then) advanced labor and education institutions in Eastern Europe did not systematically exclude women the way these institutions did in the West. Free of systemic prejudice, women in Eastern Europe have historically been equal to men in terms of participation in the labor force and in education. The numbers on this are very clear if people are willing to look. (What makes this all doubly ironic is that in these same areas "feminism" has, until recently, not taken off and they were somehow viewed as backwards by feminists in the West.)

therpe1 9y ago

Exactly. This article is naive to think there's something special about IT. All the mental gymnastics in the world can't avoid what is a pretty obvious truth: women in Eastern Europe never suffered a lost century of labor prejudice while women in the West did. Since 1917 (and even a bit before then) advanced labor and education institutions in Eastern Europe did not systematically exclude women the way these institutions did in the West. Free of systemic prejudice, women in Eastern Europe have historically been equal to men in terms of participation in the labor force and in education. The numbers on this are very clear if people are willing to look. (What makes this all doubly ironic is that in these same areas "feminism" has, until recently, not taken off and they were somehow viewed as backwards by feminists in the West.)