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So I am not Bulgarian, and not currently in that hemisphere. That said I feel as though this is unfair to many in the ex-Soviet blok countries. There was a pus

So I am not Bulgarian, and not currently in that hemisphere. That said I feel as though this is unfair to many in the ex-Soviet blok countries. There was a push in many to force equality of the genders, which may or may not have been misguided. One of my Maths professors who was very influential to me, was from that region and that time. I thank everyday that she was in a country and position to learn that. Otherwise I would be unemployed like my brother.

antt 8y ago
I am Bulgarian. The "push for gender equality" under communism is largely misunderstood, and purposefully so, in the West. As an example the entrance exams for primary school teachers were more competitive than the exams for any of the hard sciences or any type of engineering. My mother failed her teaching exam, yet was accepted into the Naval Academy, a cross between MIT and West Point. Those women who would have had the prestige of being teachers, the relatively high salaries, the early retirement and a whole host of other benefits lost them during the transition to the point that today being a teacher is one of the worst possible jobs. So now they are moving to tech, their second or third choices under Communism.
- abenedic 8y ago
  Thank you for commenting, I have not lived in a way to understand the tradeoffs. I do not mean to miss understand. Where I am from I worked with many women in tech, who all graduated from technical universities. I do not know. I hear a lot about how in the west women are dissuaded from tech. I do not know.
- robotomir 8y ago
  >the Naval Academy, a cross between MIT and West Point Buuuullshiiit.
close04 8y ago
The "push" was quite simple: they wanted people who could do the job and the gender was very far down the list of requirements. Technical universities were full of female soon-to-be engineers because there was nobody to tell them it's not a woman's job. These were among the relatively few well paid jobs so everybody would go for them. And women were expected to work just as men did since one income per family wouldn't be enough. There was never a time in the recent history of those countries when women were expected to stay at home (more than the maternity leave) or have menial jobs so there was no reason to have that imbalance. This is seen pretty clearly in the gender pay gap for some of those countries [0] and the average number of women working in science and tech [1]. Today on average you can make just as much money in PR as in engineering. Since the choice is much wider now it's easier to fall prey to that "not a job for a woman" BS. I can assure you if an engineering job became one of the few ways to escape poverty the balance would quickly shift towards neutral. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Human_resources_in_science_and_technology_-_stocks https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- doombolt 8y ago
  The pay for engineering was actually quite poor in Soviet block. If money were what you wanted, you'll go into coal mining. Sadly, most of those to-be-engineers of both genders will find themself sitting 9-to-5 doing nothing useful, and then their jobs will evaporate as socialism fails.
  - close04 8y ago
    > as socialism fails You mean "as communism failed". I wasn't talking about the Soviet bloc as it is today but the former "USSR-aligned" countries like those referenced in this article (countries like Bulgaria or Romania) during communist times. They were and still are in that region of prosperity where they could never afford to have a single income earner in the family so pragmatism led to a more uniform development path for both men and women alike. So in those communist times they pumped out tens of thousands of qualified engineers with no regard to their gender. And while some of the opportunities they had in their home countries may have dried out over the past few decades that "legacy" of not caring about gender means today's Europe is full of such "eastern" male and female engineers doing everything from writing software for your bank to designing the suspension of your car. There may be countries that "import" more skilled female engineers than they bother to produce internally. Probably for the same reason prosperous countries like Switzerland, Germany, UK, or Austria pay their women ~20% less than the men. If you work in IT and have any kind of contact with teams outsourced in Eastern Europe you probably already noticed that you're just as likely to deal with qualified women as with qualified men. As for coal mining every single piece of literature I've come across about that period mentions low wages, no paid overtime, 7 day work week, pay cuts for not meeting production quotas, poor living conditions, "shortened" lifespan, etc. That's a far cry from the engineers working to build cars like Bulgarrenault, Bulgaralpine, Pirin-FIAT, Chavdar, and whatever else they were manufacturing at the time. Full disclosure: I am not Bulgarian and never lived there.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and it never called itself communist. Communism was supposed to be the utopian society that was always just around the corner. As the Soviet joke goes: "We are told that the communism is already seen at the horizon. What then is a horizon? " "Horizon is an imaginary line which moves away each time you approach it." The party was a Communist Party, yes - as in, a party of communists. And communists would be people who believed that communism is possible and desirable (indeed, within Marxist-Leninist philosophy, it was deemed historically inevitable - the only question was, how soon), and so made efforts to advance society towards it. As far as coal miners, I can't speak for Bulgaria, but it's very well known that physical work paid significantly more than any intellectual work in late USSR (roughly 1960-...) - that was part of the whole "dictatorship of the proletariat" arrangement, as it was interpreted by the official ideology. In 1980s, a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer would be getting 120-200 rubles per month, while a factory worker or a miner would be getting 200-600 rubles, depending on qualification and working conditions. Workers could make even more by signing up to work in adverse conditions (northern polar regions, for example) where the salary would be multiplied by coefficients reflecting that adversity. In factories, it was not uncommon for the workers to get 2x of what their supervising engineer did.

antt 8y ago

I am Bulgarian. The "push for gender equality" under communism is largely misunderstood, and purposefully so, in the West. As an example the entrance exams for primary school teachers were more competitive than the exams for any of the hard sciences or any type of engineering. My mother failed her teaching exam, yet was accepted into the Naval Academy, a cross between MIT and West Point. Those women who would have had the prestige of being teachers, the relatively high salaries, the early retirement and a whole host of other benefits lost them during the transition to the point that today being a teacher is one of the worst possible jobs. So now they are moving to tech, their second or third choices under Communism.

abenedic 8y ago
Thank you for commenting, I have not lived in a way to understand the tradeoffs. I do not mean to miss understand. Where I am from I worked with many women in tech, who all graduated from technical universities. I do not know. I hear a lot about how in the west women are dissuaded from tech. I do not know.
robotomir 8y ago
>the Naval Academy, a cross between MIT and West Point Buuuullshiiit.

close04 8y ago

The "push" was quite simple: they wanted people who could do the job and the gender was very far down the list of requirements. Technical universities were full of female soon-to-be engineers because there was nobody to tell them it's not a woman's job. These were among the relatively few well paid jobs so everybody would go for them. And women were expected to work just as men did since one income per family wouldn't be enough. There was never a time in the recent history of those countries when women were expected to stay at home (more than the maternity leave) or have menial jobs so there was no reason to have that imbalance. This is seen pretty clearly in the gender pay gap for some of those countries [0] and the average number of women working in science and tech [1]. Today on average you can make just as much money in PR as in engineering. Since the choice is much wider now it's easier to fall prey to that "not a job for a woman" BS. I can assure you if an engineering job became one of the few ways to escape poverty the balance would quickly shift towards neutral. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Human_resources_in_science_and_technology_-_stocks https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

doombolt 8y ago
The pay for engineering was actually quite poor in Soviet block. If money were what you wanted, you'll go into coal mining. Sadly, most of those to-be-engineers of both genders will find themself sitting 9-to-5 doing nothing useful, and then their jobs will evaporate as socialism fails.
- close04 8y ago
  > as socialism fails You mean "as communism failed". I wasn't talking about the Soviet bloc as it is today but the former "USSR-aligned" countries like those referenced in this article (countries like Bulgaria or Romania) during communist times. They were and still are in that region of prosperity where they could never afford to have a single income earner in the family so pragmatism led to a more uniform development path for both men and women alike. So in those communist times they pumped out tens of thousands of qualified engineers with no regard to their gender. And while some of the opportunities they had in their home countries may have dried out over the past few decades that "legacy" of not caring about gender means today's Europe is full of such "eastern" male and female engineers doing everything from writing software for your bank to designing the suspension of your car. There may be countries that "import" more skilled female engineers than they bother to produce internally. Probably for the same reason prosperous countries like Switzerland, Germany, UK, or Austria pay their women ~20% less than the men. If you work in IT and have any kind of contact with teams outsourced in Eastern Europe you probably already noticed that you're just as likely to deal with qualified women as with qualified men. As for coal mining every single piece of literature I've come across about that period mentions low wages, no paid overtime, 7 day work week, pay cuts for not meeting production quotas, poor living conditions, "shortened" lifespan, etc. That's a far cry from the engineers working to build cars like Bulgarrenault, Bulgaralpine, Pirin-FIAT, Chavdar, and whatever else they were manufacturing at the time. Full disclosure: I am not Bulgarian and never lived there.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    USSR stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and it never called itself communist. Communism was supposed to be the utopian society that was always just around the corner. As the Soviet joke goes: "We are told that the communism is already seen at the horizon. What then is a horizon? " "Horizon is an imaginary line which moves away each time you approach it." The party was a Communist Party, yes - as in, a party of communists. And communists would be people who believed that communism is possible and desirable (indeed, within Marxist-Leninist philosophy, it was deemed historically inevitable - the only question was, how soon), and so made efforts to advance society towards it. As far as coal miners, I can't speak for Bulgaria, but it's very well known that physical work paid significantly more than any intellectual work in late USSR (roughly 1960-...) - that was part of the whole "dictatorship of the proletariat" arrangement, as it was interpreted by the official ideology. In 1980s, a teacher, a doctor, or an engineer would be getting 120-200 rubles per month, while a factory worker or a miner would be getting 200-600 rubles, depending on qualification and working conditions. Workers could make even more by signing up to work in adverse conditions (northern polar regions, for example) where the salary would be multiplied by coefficients reflecting that adversity. In factories, it was not uncommon for the workers to get 2x of what their supervising engineer did.