Is obtaining a PhD from an Asian country really a career suicide?

Well, your question is broad, but to be on point, Asia needs PhDs, if you have the competent advisor and the relationship is not "master and servant", then you have high prospects to become a good independent scholar. Competition for the job is lower than in West. About ranking, I really can't comment if it is beneficial in future employment, I think what is important is the ranking and the impact factor of the journals where you publish.

That being said, there are departments in obscure places in Iran, Thailand, Turkey, Taiwan that have higher H index than well know and regarded departments in West.

Also as far as I noticed, gender relationship and position of women in STEM is much better than in West.

There are known metrics to evaluate students' PhD performance regardless of where they studied for their PhD. One of such is the quality of their publications, where they publish their work and the level of impact in their research domain. Another is the supervisor and his/her reputation. So whether obtaining the PhD is from Asia or the West is not a strong yardstick.

Yes and no.

Jeff Huang and his student at Brown University compiled data from over 2,200 computer science professors in the United States. The data is only from the top 50 CS graduate programs. A writeup is available here, and the raw data is available here.

If you believe the data, then out of over 2,200 computer science professors at the top 50 programs, many got their Bachelor's degree from Asian universities, but only a few got their PhDs there:

• 8 from China
• 17 from India
• 1 from Singapore
• 47 from Israel
• 11 from Russia

In fact among all universities with at least 10 graduates who went on to become CS professors in the US, only one, the Hebrew University in Israel, is not in the US. In other words CS professors in the US, at least in top programs, are overwhelmingly likely to have gotten their PhDs from a US university.

That's the yes part. Now for the no part: this data is only in the US, and it's natural to expect that the data for any country is biased in favour of students who did their PhDs in the country (for example, there are only 16 CS professors in the US with a doctorate from France). The students awarded PhDs by these Asian universities can't have just disappeared; they must've gotten jobs elsewhere. In all likelihood, they were successful, just not in the sense of becoming a professor in the US.

So what is career suicide to you? If your aim is to become a CS professor in the US, then you should get a PhD from a US university, preferably MIT, followed by UC Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in that order. If you don't mind working elsewhere or perhaps taking on a different job, then there's nothing wrong with studying elsewhere also.