The countries that minted the most female college graduates in fields like science, engineering, or math were also some of the least gender-equal countries. According to a paper by Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary, psychologists at Leeds Beckett University and the University of Missouri respectively, this is because the countries that empower women also empower them, indirectly, to pick whatever career they"d enjoy most and be best at."Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states," they write, "with a high level of social security." Meanwhile, less gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose stem professions, since they offer a more certain financial future than，say, painting or writing.
When the experts looked at the "overall life satisfaction" rating of each country — a measure of economic opportunity and hardship — they found that gender-equal countries had more life satisfaction. The life-satisfaction ranking explained 35 percent of the variation between gender equality and women"s participation in stem. That correlation echoes past research showing that the genders are actually more segregated by field of study in more economically developed places.
The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they"re not interested.
The findings will likely seem controversial, since the idea that men and women have different inherent abilities is often used as a reason, by some，to argue we should forget trying to recruit more women into the stem fields. But, as the University of Wisconsin gender- studies professor Janet Shibley Hyde put it, that9s not quite what"s happening here.
"Some would say that the gender stem gap occurs not because girls can"t do science，
but because they have other alternatives, based on their strengths in verbal skills," she said. ""In wealthy nations, they believe that they have the freedom to pursue those alternatives and not worry so much that they pay less."
Instead, this line of research, if it’s replicated, might hold useful takeaways for people who do want to see more Western women entering stem fields. In this study, the percentage of girls who did excel in science or math was still larger than the number of women who were graduating with stem degrees. That means there’s something in even the most liberal societies that’s nudging women away from math and science, even when those are their best subjects. The women-in-stem advocates could, for starters, focus their efforts on those would-be stem stars.