> No... I mean the dictionary definition. Where men didn't have the right to vote, work or own property until recently, where women are expected to own and make all the money, where men are raised to be married away, where men are expected to make the coffee and women to run the meeting. So on and so forth. I'm afraid that entire paragraph does not address my comment because you misunderstood what matriarchy means.

We would expect to see even lower rates of women in STEM. The data shows an inverse relationship between women gaining more rights and resources and women's representation in STEM.

> Not if you take into consideration the labour participation rate... If you do, the disparity basically disappears. These societies with rigid gender rules tend to have less women overall working at all.

Yes, they do. Differences in labor force participation do not hold up to scrutiny. Plenty of the countries with less women's equality also have high labor force participation [1].

> But they were forced to do that until the 90s under communism, I'm not talking about peasants in the middle ages. I mention Eastern Europe because I'm trying to give you alternative explanations for women participation in STEM. Eastern Europe and India have similar rates of participation but are vastly different societies. What do they have in common? They are not the West. They don't have the West's cultural norms. Ergo, one of those norms is stopping women from going into STEM. That, to me, sounds more likely. Much easier to explain vs trying to find something in common between India and Eastern Europe, which is pretty crazy.

But India and Eastern Europe still see low rates of women in technology. In fact, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic see the same or lower rates of women in technology than in the United States.

You're pointing out these differences, and these differences do not yield higher rates of women in technology. So why do you seem to think that these differences are significantly affecting rates of women in technology.

> And my point is your cultural expectation do not translate to other cultures. There might be a specific gender inequality that stops women from entering STEM. That may or may not exist in a society, independent on what gender inequality is overall. Vastly different societies like India and Eastern Europe have similar participation rates, despite the fact that Eastern Europe is much wealthier. If what you said is true, you'd expect Eastern Europe to have lower participation rate than India, but that's not the case. Correlation broken.

Eastern Europe does have lower rates of women in technology than India. India has ~30% women in STEM [2]. Whereas the Eastern European countries have representation mostly in the range of 20-25%.

> That just means the problem is beyond just STEM, not an explanation.

Correct. The "problem" is that men and women have difference interests, and this difference is largely universal across different societies.

Does social influence have some effect? Probably. We observe that countries with less rights and opportunities for women do have higher rates of women in technology than more egalitarian countries. But this influence only shifts the representation of women in tech by 10-15%.

1. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/female_labor_force...

2. https://research.swe.org/2018/07/india-undergraduate-educati...