My, uneducated, guess on Iran is that college-eligible men are likelier to go to madrassas or the like seeking government or religious power over education. Do you think that, or some other explanation, is right, or do you think that women are better represented in STEM in Iran due to a more egalitarian childhood?
Neither. Obviously Iran is not an egalitarian society; the idea’s absurd. However, Iran is also not Afghanistan; most people have a broadly secular edification. Iranian men do go to university in quite large numbers.
I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.
We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).
> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.
So why are there women in stem if they really want to learn about fabrics?
Or, do you really mean that women only enter jobs when men leave openings?
I think you're forgetting the term "tend". Even in Iran my expectation is that if you were to repeat the experiment from the featured article you would get similar results.
I assume though that Iran has a smaller portion of the population in college and that men are preferentially pursuing political or theological power over STEM education. Of course, these are assumptions which is why I'm asking questions to understand better.
Do you think that in Iran their children's books more prominently feature female scientists?
