Our thanks to Keith for this. A paragraph echoing what we know of women and STEM subjects in Scandinavia:
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.
Justice for Men & Boys 
If one were to look at the data for the EU (and given the recent focus due to Brexit one might think more would) one finds precisely this reflected in all the key feminist measures. The countries with more women in top management (not quotas in politics or Boards), lowest “wage gap” and greatest diversity in the jobs women do are Catholic and “traditional” socially. Most of all they have small “part time” labour markets and quite short maternity leave. Italy and Poland being far “ahead” of Sweden in all measures mentioned and in some measures “worse” even than the UK Germany or even the Netherlands . Now the issue is clouded by “Gender Equality Indexes” which tend to include “inputs” such as “family friendly work rights, quotas in politics, free childcare, extensive maternity rights”. However ,as this report reminds us, all these policies increasing women’s choices in fact reduce diversity and actually mitigate against the feminists’ goals of equal incomes. In a sense the Swedes at least admitted this by instituting enforced time off for fathers (rather than the more effective reduction of maternity leave to Italian levels) in an attempt to get Swedish men to be as part time as their women.
As intimated in this research in Scandinavia and northern Europe women crowd into public sector and office industries where incomes are often high enough to take advantage of generous family friendly policies.
Their “sistas” in southern and eastern Europe often have, like the men, to get on with it and work hard. Choosing subjects and sectors in a much more hard headed way.
If one genuinely wanted to address the gender wage gap one would look at Italy (6%) not Sweden (16%). If you give women the choice to work less, they do! Goodness who’d have thought it .
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Clearly what the author is trying to say, in so many words, is that females living in welfare countries have a third option to either having to be a good wife or having to work hard.
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