in this thread, /u/alonreddit explains an anecdote about his/her grandma being educated in the 50s, explaining that men did worse at math than women, and gives two explanations to what happened, (albeit with no sources to experts able to back up his opinion) His conclusions appear sound, but with out proper evidence, no one can take what he said with out major skepticism.
Here is the comment:
Well, hello, here's a thread I can contribute to.
My grandmother was a structural engineer, educated in the former Soviet bloc in the 50s. My mother is a civil engineer, educated in the former Soviet bloc at the start of the 80s. Both have had amazing careers and reached high in their profession: my grandmother leading the technical section in a government department and my mother now leading a large team of building services engineers in a western country. When my mother entered university, there was a policy of positive discrimination in favour of men to ensure they had 50% enrolment in engineering - men could be admitted with lower math scores, as they were getting their asses handed to them.
Obviously fewer women choose engineering in the West and fewer go on to specialised masters and doctoral degrees - but that's an observation and not an explanation. I think you're absolutely right that the profession itself is not overtly hostile to women. Or, at least, it is not hostile to a degree that would deter a woman committed to it - my mother being demonstration of that, though she's had tough times with having to demonstrate double the competence in order to be taken as seriously as any man (read some of ridiculous mocking comments about women and math below for a good demonstration of that phenomenon!)
So why do women make those choices? Let me throw out 2 explanations:
First, communist ideology was a strong driving force. A paradoxical effect of all the workers being equal, and the motherland needing the labour of all, was that women were genuinely considered to have identical (intellectual, technical) capacities as men. By stark contrast, consider that women in the West are socialised to be nurturing, pretty, in need of protection - and that is reflected in them taking on nurturing roles, e.g. 76% of public school teachers in the US are women! (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28) Of course they are: imagine them, with flowing skirts and surrounded by so many children in need of nurturing. Nurturing, nurturing everywhere!!! Nurses are another great example. According to this US Bureau of Stats report, some 9% of nurses in the US are male (http://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupations.pdf). Consider that alongside all the super sexy nurses being rammed on youporn, and you might be starting to see a pattern.
Second, the former Soviet bloc also had the policy in place to ensure that women could commit to masters degrees and doctoral degrees. AND have children. My mother had a paid year off halfway through her masters to have me. And after that? Free childcare, then kindergarden, etc. She went back to finish her masters, and get another, and have a fulfilling career. She didn't have to choose a profession with the expectation that she would be screwed if she ever decided to have a child. This is not to say that "communism was awesome". Obviously it was not. But US-style extremist individualism isn't really working either - and losing out on a huge portion of engineering talent is only one side-effect.
The situation in post-war Soviet Union isn't really comparable to the United States. Such a huge portion of the male population had been employed in military affairs or killed that women stepped into many roles that men performed. Even when the war was over there was a lack of men to take all the positions back over.
By the end of the war 56% of the labor force was occupied by women. Farms were basically totally run by women, and by 1950 still 59% female run. Even in 1980, 51% of the workforce was composed of women, and few of those were in manual labor in factories or farms. 50% of engineers and 80% of physicians were women.
However; those numbers can be misleading. Women in all of those positions were compensated far less than their male contemporaries and often held less prestigious positions despite the same qualifications. Women physicians, for example, were often in family medicine or primary care and would earn less than a male machinist.
One thing that this also doesn't cover is that women were expected to still work a 'double shift', that is, once their work at their job was done they worked at home as a mother. Men were not expected to do house work despite the 'equality' of the sexes under communism. In fact, many Stalinist policies attempted to push women aside back to the home. So yes, a woman could go get a masters degree and be an engineer, but she was still expected to be home maker on top of all of that.
Women were also still strongly associated with the nurturing caring image that was present in the United States. The idea of Mother Russia, and women in iconography in the Soviet Union was pervasive. Women were considered builders, healers, and the center of the home in Russian society. In 1980 approximately 80% of educators were women in the Soviet Union, actually higher than in the United States at the time.
Clements, Barbara Evans, Barbara Alpern. Engel, and Christine Worobec. Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.,
Those are certainly aspects of the situation. Yes, communism advocated equality between men and women and the USSR had much more generous "benefits" for women with children than historically we have had in the US.
However it's also important to note that during WWII the USSR had a far more drastic version of the homefront situation in the US where women were forced to take traditionally male jobs because men were off fighting. WWII killed around 21% of the men of the Soviet Union (36% of the 20-34 year olds) compared to 6% of the women (source: Wikipedia), so it was inevitable that during and after the war, there would be an increase of women in traditionally male professions.