Meanwhile, I meet lots of women at my place of work who come from Indian, Iranian, Turkish, Arab, Hindu and Muslim backgrounds, which are all cultures that are constantly accused of being sexist in the western media. And yet these women seem to have no issues living alone abroad and pursuing a STEM career.
Is generally not a good idea to extrapolate anecdotal evidence as fact. These individual women you know might have had “no problem”, and still these be sexist societies.
Indeed, India has plenty of misogyny (you only need to look at our history of female infanticide), but also is much more open to women studying the sciences. Of course, whether or not they go on to pursue a career is a different matter, but amongst the more urban/educated class of India, it is perfectly acceptable for women to have a successful scientific career.
In my own field of cryptography, many top Indian cryptographers are women.
There was a study a while back which I recall finding that the more equal the society the less likely women were to pursue STEM careers. The places you listed had higher rates of women in STEM fields.
No big surprise, STEM is not considered manly to varying degrees in those countries either.
The whole gender concept as socially manifested only ever made sense in a pre industry society, so quite often people in countries which are behind the curve have these attitudes.
To believe in machismo or hyper femininity is pretty backwards, and has been thought as much since the mid 20th century.
As William Gibson famously wrote, the future doesn't arrive all at once.
I would be very concerned about what this is saying. I don't think it means these women experience less harassment. I suspect it means they have a higher tolerance for it from experiencing more of it. To me, this says we have a long way to go to improve workplaces for everyone.
