All I have is personal anecdotes as an Eastern European woman in STEM. Both my parents were engineers. Father a marine engineer. Mother was an early days progra

All I have is personal anecdotes as an Eastern European woman in STEM. Both my parents were engineers. Father a marine engineer. Mother was an early days programmer in the days of punch cards, and also told stories of working as a researcher with some kind of vacuum technology in university. I have vivid memories of her bringing home stacks and stacks of used punch cards so that I could use them as scrap paper to draw in the margins (blank paper was valued and used only for "proper" illustration attempts; sketching and doodling was done on punch cards or in margins of old newspapers). My grandmother was a mathematics teacher. When I meet another Eastern European person in tech, often I hear that their parents were also engineers of some sort (and commonly were in some sort of rock band before deciding to pursue their engineering career full time...) Unfortunately some comments here about how women were "totally equal" in the Soviet Union paint an overly rosy picture. In practice, this was not the case. Women were not just expected to do the same professional work as men, but to also be responsible for cooking, cleaning, and domestic duties in general in addition to that.