Meet the Lab Girl
nautil.us
nautil.us
Does that include coal mining, construction, fishing, farming, forestry/logging, waste disposal, protective services, dishwashing, landscaping/groundskeeping, pest control, stonemasonry, flooring, plumbing, highway maintenance, auto mechanics, HVAC, machining, welding, cabinetry, wastewater treatment, and truck driving?
Or is it more likely that jobs that are extremely dangerous, highly stressful, physically demanding, low pay, or any or all of the above just aren't very attractive to women? I mean, they're not all that attractive to a lot of men, either, so that's perfectly fine. I don't really like the thought of spending weeks at a time on a small fishing trawler with a dozen other guys, myself, especially if there's a 1 in 1,000 chance I'd die from it.
My aunt used to be a truck driver. She enjoyed it, the pay was decent and got along great with a lot of the drivers she ran into. She also got mugged a few times, often at gunpoint.
And you've hit on the point - jobs that aren't attractive to women aren't attractive to men, either. The result is that women aren't there because they're unwelcome, not because women shy away from "heavy" work.
With some jobs they're not just unattractive but one is simply incapable of meeting the physical demands. If you need to be stronger than 80% of men to be able to do a job then there's going to be a vanishingly small percentage of women able to do it. Then you need those women to have no better option, or a strong desire to do that particular job, with a lot of jobs.
It's like jobs with lots of manual dexterity needed, if you have bigger hands you can't do it well - this means women (and in some places children) have these jobs.
To me it's not obvious what the dimensions are that are relevant to professions that humans have a gender disposition toward, and what percentage of out current distribution of professions should be explained by cultural ideas rather than such dispositions, and it may never be obvious.
Regardless, (and this is a tangent to the current comment thread) I understand the current push for gender diversity in professions to have several purposes that is not contingent on there being no gender disposition in professions.
1) Maximizing individual capabilities. The idea being that proponents of profession diversity wants to increase the number of fulfilling career paths an individual is able to make by removing obstacles, real and perceived, by the individual and by the industry. Obstacles include, for example, pay differences, glass ceilings, stigmata, workplace hours.
2) Increasing manpower, which is related to the previous goal, but from the perspective of government. When people able to perform well at a job but instead work at a job where they provide suboptimal utility due to gender discrimination, that is value lost for a society. When professions and gender are rigid, that is resilience and flexibility compromised. A competitive society thus has an incentive to decouple professions from gender.
Thus, whereas a gender disposition may explain present distributions, it nevertheless does not invalidate the reasons behind
This kind of thing was said in the 60s when factory owners employed women. "Nimble fingers!" The reason they said it was because unions were much weaker at protecting women's rights, and so bosses could pay women considerably less for work of equivalent skill. That's what the Dagenham strikes were about. That was in 1968 so it's really weird to hear it still being said today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_sewing_machinists_strike_...
Perhaps it served the purposes of factory owners to emphasise it but I'd assumed that was why factories globally [seemingly] have more women doing soldering of components and placing of electronics in to casings and such. I spend a good deal of time looking at other people's hands (pottery workshops) and find as a generality that women do have more nimble fingers and less upper body strength (of course it's a distribution that overlaps); nimbleness might be down to other activities rather than being inherent in females but that wouldn't stop more females having roles that favour nimbleness.
Using a sewing machine for large items like car upholstery I can't see hand-size being terribly important; I've moderately large hands and never had a problem with using a sewing machine - I can't manage needle and thread too well though. That said your link seems to concern the general idea of paying women less conflated with a specific job being degraded in value rather than the idea of men/womens general body sizes being pertinent to suitability for certain jobs.
For example, mining has "Women in Mining": http://www.womeninmining.org/
Fishing has traditionally been actively anti women because of superstitions about women on boats. Here's one woman trying to make a difference to that: http://www.lattianderson.com/chix-who-fish-commercial-fisher...
Welding: http://www.witc.edu/pgmpages/welding/women.htm http://www.womeninwelding.com/ http://www.nbcnews.com/business/careers/hey-women-want-hot-c...
Forestry: http://fica.org.nz/women-in-forestry/
Plumbing: http://www.theplumbette.com.au/plumbing/women-in-plumbing-br...
Automotive maintenance: Women in the industry in the US are 10% of the service workers; 10% of the technicians; 23% of the operatives; 28% of the laborors. http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-automotive-industry ETC ETC.
Note these are not "women who do the cleaning in the offices of oil companies", or "accountants in the coal mining industry", but "women who do the mining".
Note also that this works for men too. There are programmes to increase the numbers of men working in education (especially for young children); nursing; etc.
> Or is it more likely that jobs that are extremely dangerous, highly stressful, physically demanding, low pay, or any or all of the above just aren't very attractive to women? I mean, they're not all that attractive to a lot of men, either
So you're saying these jobs are universally unattractive, and that the fact they're dominated by men has nothing at all to do with underlying sexism? Not the "we don't employ women" style sexism, but the more insidious "we employ anyone. But, why would you want to do this dangerous heavy job?" style sexism.
I mean, there are plenty of physically fit but poor women who need work.