Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American. But immigrants you see were very really motivated to leave the post-Soviet hell, so they had to show excellent results.
Math is taught horrifyingly badly in Eastern Europe. It presented as something extremely overcomplicated and most teachers, having a laughably low salary they barely survive on, don't care teaching it in a way kids would understand.
> Survivorship bias. Eastern Europeans are actually very bad with math, no better than your regular American.
Most people everywhere are bad at math. However, Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US. And it's not even close, if you look at math competitions. Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
I've long pondered a similar question - why are there so many Indian and Pakistani women in SWE in comparison to western women? Are Indian/Pakistani women better than western women in engineering? Is the education there better? How are these countries successful in mitigating this gender gap?
My theory is that this is actually caused by sexism and gender discrimination. There are smart, intelligent women everywhere, but due to sexism many career options have been traditionally closed for women in these societies, while SWE (as a completely new field) isn't. Their high numbers can be explained by the lack of opportunities in other areas. If you're an intelligent woman in Pakistan, IT is one of the few ways to prosper, meanwhile a woman in the West has way more opportunities.
I think it used to be the same principle with science in EE. Like, you're a highly intelligent person, you strive for success and recognition. In US, the classic path is entrepreneurship, but that was pretty much closed / very difficult in the Soviet block. You could get into politics, but you have to bend the knee to the party line. Science is one of the few avenues where you can thrive intellectually, get recognition and keep yourself relatively unaffected by politics.
There is a general finding that women go into engineering fields (and other relatively high-paying fields) more the poorer their country is. Neither "software engineering" nor "India / Pakistan" is an exceptional case; there is no reason to look at the specifics of the field or the region.
Usually the theory is that women everywhere hate engineering, but poor women may suck it up and go into engineering anyway because they need the money.
I agree this has an effect as well - software engineering is one of the few fields which provide good living in those countries.
However, coming from (relatively poor, but relatively gender-egalitarian) Eastern Europe, female engineers aren't anywhere close to the amount in e.g. India and Pakistan, so I don't think it can explain the disparity completely.
Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented among the US team members.
Still survivorship bias. Immigrants from China and India are not selected randomly from the population, they're selected by their means and determination to emigrate. Furthermore, if you include the fact that the US caps the number of visas granted on a per-country-of-origin basis and the fact that China and India have the 2 largest populations in the world, the people who successfully obtain visas from these countries are the survivors of the most stringent selection process.
> Eastern Europeans and Asians have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math compared to the US.
These are two different claims:
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in the US have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
Eastern Europeans and Asians who are in their respective countries have a larger percentage of people who end up good at math.*
If you are making the first claim, you're just restating the parent comment's survivorship bias claim. If you're making the second, then you are making a strong claim, but it would be interesting to see data behind it. (I don't have any insight one way or the other.)
> Immigrants and children of immigrants are over-represented
That's exactly the bias. Immigrants are self-selected for higher risk tolerance, higher endurance, often wider or deeper knowledge, and readiness to think hard and work hard to achieve a better place in life.
Unsurprisingly, these same qualities help achieve results in studying and professional career.
Coming from a culture that respects abstracted knowledge (Chinese, Jewish, Russian, Indian, etc) helps additionally, but is by far not sufficient by itself.
There are lots of Chinese and Indians, are you sure that there is a larger percentage who are good at math? When you take 1.4 billion x2 compared to 380 million Americans, the percentages don’t have to be high. Immigrants from those two countries at least, also tend to be in highly educated and more well off segments of those societies. You could find a lot of Chinese refugees from Vietnam in the early 80s not actually good at math, and instead having typical problems refugee communities have. You’ll also find this in African immigrant populations today if you compare refugees from east Africa to Africans who went the work visa route. Race isn’t really an indicator of anything compared to education background and the resources your family has access to (and inter generational knowledge on using those resources).
Math is taught horrifyingly badly in Eastern Europe. It presented as something extremely overcomplicated and most teachers, having a laughably low salary they barely survive on, don't care teaching it in a way kids would understand.