26/7/2021 Socialist countries employ more women in math and science — Quartz

SOCIALIST STUDIES

What the US can learn from women in the Soviet workforce

AP PHOTO/JENS MEYER
Let's talk about women's work.

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By Kristen R. Ghodsee
Author, professor of Russian and East European studies, University ofPennsylvania
Published November 13, 2019

In episode two of HBO’s 10-Emmy award-winning series Chernobyl,

lead character Ulana Khomyuk (played by Emily Watson) delivers a
scathing line to a male Soviet Communist Party leader: “I am a
nuclear physicist. Before you were deputy secretary, you worked in a
shoe factory.”

Chernobyl (2019) | Official Trailer | HBO

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26/7/2021 Socialist countries employ more women in math and science — Quartz

The dialogue hints at a fascinating reversal of traditional gender

roles. In fact, writer Craig Mazin invented the fictional character of
Khomyuk in recognition of the important scientific contributions of
socialist women.

“One area where the Soviets were actually more progressive than we
were was in the area of science and medicine,” Mazin explained on
Variety’s TV Take podcast. “The Soviet Union had quite a large
percentage of female doctors.”

Most historians agree that the Eastern Bloc countries aggressively

pursued policies to promote women into previously male-dominated
professions and supported women’s full-time employment through
the provision of job protected parental leaves and state subsidized
crèches and kindergartens.

Girls in STEM

This isn’t just a historical phenomenon, however. Socialist programs

that encouraged women and girls to study and work in math and
science have been a gift that keeps on giving.

This is especially timely for the US as it approaches the 2020

presidential election and candidates advocate for policies that can
increase women’s political representation, promote fare wages, and
support more inclusive healthcare. As capitalist Western countries
continue to wrestle with a dismal record of gender parity in the
workforce, it’s worth examining this Soviet-era blueprint.

“
In 1975 the USSR actually introduced
quotas to increase the proportion of men
attending medical school.
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26/7/2021 Socialist countries employ more women in math and science — Quartz

”
Even three decades after the end of the Cold War, scholars still find
substantial differences in aptitude and professional success between
women in capitalist and former state socialist countries. A 2018
study titled “Math, Girls, and Socialism” examined a robust dataset
of self-reported academic grades in mathematics together with
standardized test scores. Using the former division of Germany as a
natural experiment to isolate the historical effects of capitalist
versus state socialist education—and controlling for differences in
economic conditions and teaching styles—the researchers found that
teenage girls in the former Eastern part of the country significantly
outperformed their western German peers in terms of closing the
gender gap with boys.

The researchers found that “girls in the East feel less anxious and
more confident about their aptitude in math than their counterparts
from West Germany,” and were less likely to be intimidated in
competitive situations with boys.

By further comparing the standardized test scores for children across

the continent, the authors also found evidence that “the gender gap
in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the
Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe.” In some former
socialist countries, the gender gap in mathematics aptitude
disappeared altogether.

A similar story can be told about medicine. In Latvia and Estonia, for
example, women accounted for nearly three out of every four
medical doctors in 2018—75% compared to only 34% in the United
States. Across the former Eastern Bloc, women dominated the field
of medicine throughout the Cold War, so that in 1975, the USSR
actually introduced quotas to increase the proportion of men
attending medical school.

In the realm of technology and engineering, four of the European

Union’s top five most gender-balanced tech workforces in 2017 were
in former socialist countries: Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and
Latvia. According to Eurostat, Bulgaria boasted the highest
percentage of women working in information and communication
technologies at 27% compared with the EU average of 17%.
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26/7/2021 Socialist countries employ more women in math and science — Quartz

In 2018, eight of the top 10 countries with the highest proportion of

women working in high-tech companies were in Eastern Europe.

Bulgaria also had the highest percentage of female students in these

fields in 2017; at 33% one in every three tech students in Bulgaria
was a woman. Across the EU, the average was 17% with the
Netherlands at an abysmal 6% and Belgium at 8%, most likely
because girls avoid studying subjects in fields where they are
unlikely to find employment.

But what explains these stark differences? Eastern Bloc countries

once celebrated the equality of men and women as one of the unique
products of building a socialist society, in no small part because
socialist countries faced severe labor shortages after WWI in the
USSR and after WWII throughout the Soviet Bloc.

As a result, socialist countries began training women in science and

engineering well before Western countries.

For instance, 43% of Romanian students enrolled in engineering

institutes were women in 1970, as were 39% of all engineering
students in the USSR and 27% of students in Bulgaria. Compare
these percentages to the United States, where by 1976 women
earned only 3% of bachelor’s degrees in engineering.

Rebalancing act

“
In Latvia and Estonia women accounted for
75%  of medical doctors compared to 34%
in the United States in 2018.

”
But it wasn’t only state investments in education that made the
difference. Socialists understood that women would always face a
disadvantage on the free market for labor because of childbearing
and their domestic responsibilities. If care work occasionally forces
women out of the labor force, employers view them as less reliable

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26/7/2021 Socialist countries employ more women in math and science — Quartz

employees, which means they are paid less and have fewer resources
invested in their professional development in the long run. In
science and technology careers where research, innovation, and
product development proceed at lightning speed, the perception that
women are more likely to temporarily leave the labor force renders
them less than ideal employees.

In countries such as the former German Democratic Republic or

Bulgaria, state-owned technology enterprises—such as those that
made the Robotron computers in East Germany or the Pravetz
computers in Bulgaria—could hire qualified women with more
confidence.

Family responsibilities interfered relatively less with women’s work

because the state had socialized many of the domestic tasks
shouldered by women in capitalist countries. Childcare, public
cafeterias, and public laundries, as well as an extensive network of
sanatoria to care for the aged and infirm, meant less care work for
women in the private sphere. And when an expectant mother took
her paid job-protected maternity leave, the state easily organized
her temporary replacement with a qualified university graduate
completing their mandatory national service.

As more women thrived in careers in science, math, medicine, and

engineering, more girls pursued studies in those fields. The higher
percentage of women in the dynamic technology sector today is a
direct result of state socialist policies that both encouraged women
to enter male-dominated fields and alleviated their domestic
responsibilities through the public provision of social services.

Chernobyl’s Ulana Khomyuk may be a fictional character, but she

represents a valuable lesson from 20th century Eastern Europe that
is well worth remembering:

Girls and women are no less capable than boys and men, but without
institutional interventions to encourage their studies and support
their informal responsibilities for care work, gender gaps in fields
like science and medicine will persist.

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26/7/2021 Socialist countries employ more women in math and science — Quartz

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