I can believe in my theory until it is disproven. It has yet to be disproven, and given how the gender balance in these fields has similar bias in all developed nations I'll likely never get disproven.
Your theory that women are held back by bias would require that every developed country coordinated their biases so they map the same by field. That doesn't make sense, there is no way I'll believe that is true unless some really extreme evidence is provided. How else would you explain that the gender ratio for these subjects in Russia is very close to the same as in USA? It isn't like they share culture etc. There are so many fields, why would biology have the most women, then chemistry, then civil, then mechanical etc? It is too much of a coincidence.
Interestingly the more patriarchal a country is, the more women go into STEM [1]. The societies with the most egalitarian gender roles have the lowest rates of women in STEM, while highly unequal countries have the highest.
The correlations hold true even if we exclusively examine computer science participation exclusively. Patriarchal societies have greater representation than egalitarian countries. The correlation between patriarchy and lack of representation of women in engineering subfields is not just untrue, but the opposite of what we do observe.
Once again: I am interested in the difference between participation math, earth sciences, and chemistry subfields and computer science. If you have those numbers for other countries, I'm interested. I'm not so interested in your extrapolation from overall STEM numbers.
Yup here's technology graduates specifically, apart from STEM as a whole: https://honeypotio.github.io/women-in-tech/
If anything, the gender equality paradox is even stronger. At the highest we have a lot of more conservative ex-soviet countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, and Lithuania. The United States has considerably more women in tech (25%) than more progressive countries like Sweden (21%), Norway (19%), Austria (17%), Germany (17%), Netherland (16%), Belgium(14%).
I see this argument here and there and to me it's pretty thin for a couple reasons:
1. Tech in the US is super lucrative and you can't cherry-pick it--women's salaries increase by 77% if they switch to tech here. This is true across the board: in the bottom 13 of your linked Index (sorted by % Difference of Women in Workforce and Women in Tech) women get a 29% salary increase, whereas in the top 13 the increase is 51%. This probably indicates a more parsimonious explanation: despite being more hostile to women, tech in these countries is more lucrative.
2. More broadly though, it doesn't pass a simple smoke test. Just in the top 13, how are Iceland, Ireland, and Canada right next to Romania, Turkey, and Mexico? There's a sincere lack of correlation.
I don't know what this is, but it doesn't answer the question I asked, which is "what is the difference in participation between mathematics and computer science in different countries" (or substitute chemistry for mathematics, if you like).
> the question I asked, which is "what is the difference in participation between mathematics and computer science in different countries" (or substitute chemistry for mathematics, if you like).
This chart represents this. It extracts the "T" from the rest of STEM.
I do, but that doesn't explain how everyone of those patriarchal societies developed the same with the same fields getting dominated by women when they opened up to women.
All fields were dominated by men 80 years ago and were extremely hostile to women. Since some fields attracted women and others didn't, if that was just random chance then you'd expect different cultures to see women take interest in different fields, but that didn't happen. Instead this evolved similarly all over the world.
That is a really weak argument though, Soviet and USA didn't share much culture during the cold war. Professors talking a bit to each other shouldn't affect the student bodies that much, and at the time most American influences were banned in Soviet.
So to me your explanation looks extremely weak. You can believe in that, but you wont convince me on this, there is just too much data in my favor. Of course the future could prove me wrong and I am open to that, but I'd argue that the data we have today strongly supports my stance.
Note, I am not saying that we should discourage women who want to enter these fields. That serves absolutely no purpose.
Soviet and USA didn't share much culture during the cold war
They certainly shared patriarchy which has been around a lot longer than the cold war. You haven't provided much in the way of numbers being 'the same' but the comparison would also be skewed by these countries' significantly different gender ratios, on top of many other factors.
Your theory that women are held back by bias would require that every developed country coordinated their biases so they map the same by field. That doesn't make sense, there is no way I'll believe that is true unless some really extreme evidence is provided. How else would you explain that the gender ratio for these subjects in Russia is very close to the same as in USA? It isn't like they share culture etc. There are so many fields, why would biology have the most women, then chemistry, then civil, then mechanical etc? It is too much of a coincidence.