The gig economy may strengthen the ‘invisible advantage’ men have at work

I've worked with a lot of men and women in a lot of different kinds of work from scientific fieldwork, to technical consulting, manual labour. I've been hired as a private consultant by both men and women, I've worked alongside men and women on equal footing, I've had to train and supervise both and I've worked under both.

When it comes to consulting type stuff I didn't really notice any difference between their willingness to pay me what I asked or bargain with me. Most of the women I know who do consulting don't have the problems described in this article and, at least in the field of biology, tend to win more contracts than men. Most of the people I worked with in Biology were women. The few men around were usually old gummers who'd been doing it for 100 years. I don't know much about how it is for computer related consulting and women. I did most of that work alone.

When it comes to heavy manual work the few women I've worked with that chose to do that kind of work outworked the men every time. When I was landscaping I seen a tiny 5 foot nothing girl rake, dig and haul faster and more than the 6 foot beefcake dude, every day while they were there. Most restoration sites I worked on were mixed crews, there was definitely a higher percentage of hard working women to men on those crews.

At my current job as a CNC programmer/operator for a granite shop, I've trained probably 4 or 5 different people to work with me now. The 4 men I trained lasted from a week to a month and a half. My current coworker, a girl, had been here for over a year now. She's learned how to program and run the machines, operate the bridge saw, move and unload slabs and lift more than any of the men I've trained could. She also wants to learn. The sad thing is I had to convince my boss, an old asian man, to hire her he wasn't going to because she was a woman. I explained to him my experiences over the years and he was willing to give her a chance. His attitude towards her over the year she's been here's changed drastically. I don't know if it's changed his view on women in general, but since then he's stopped immediately turning down women day labourers that come in to help the installers so maybe.

The biggest problem I found trying to train men was they refused to do basic boring tasks that needed to be done or complained the whole time they did them while at the same time were unwilling or unable to learn anything else.

These are just my experiences throughout my varied working life. I don't know how universally applicable they are but from what I've seen it really comes down to each individual and how suited they are for a particular job. The reality is there are some things some people will just never be able to do and it really has nothing to do with what gender a person is.