I found the article saying "behind Mongolia" to be a bit misleading, because it's apples and oranges. I've spent a fair amount of time in Ulaanbaatar and know

I found the article saying "behind Mongolia" to be a bit misleading, because it's apples and oranges. I've spent a fair amount of time in Ulaanbaatar and know Mongolian history reasonably well -- it's unique in that it's got a strong warrior/frontier ethos to it, and has since... like, forever. There's very strong traditional gender roles in Mongolia within households, though the women fall into a sort of loose warrior-matriarch ideal like the way we see Sparta depicted in movies. But it's not "women's equality" the way, say, Scandinavia is. It might be accurate, in a sense, but without context it's misleading. Mongolian society is really unique in that it shares its origins from steppe nomadic culture, traditional Northeast Asian (Confucianism, etc), Buddhism, and yet recently and still today leans slightly more towards the Russian sphere than the Chinese one, and has some elements of Eastern European culture. The women there are entrepreneurial, but also typically interested in marrying young and having 5+ children. They watch movies and television which show female Mongolian warriors like Chinggis Khan's first wife, Borte. But they also like Korean soap operas. It's a tricky to place to get one's mind around, quite unique, but potentially misleading in a Western-centric piece without context.