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Comment by almostjazz | Hacker News Reader

There are women construction workers, garbage people, and firefighters. There are much better reasons why these fields have disproportionately fewer women than a biological barrier to the required level of strength.

I am interested to hear what career or societal role you think a women cannot or should not do because of menstrual related mood swings. Because it clearly isn't President of the United States or billionaire CEO.

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There're always exceptions. But so far what I see it's 100-to-1 if not worse. And I'm not at all surprised that women ain't exactly keen of lugging around heavy weights. Especially due to damage it can do to women-specific health. Or reduced abilities abilities after childbirth for many women. Of course nowadays many women don't care about their reproductive health nor give births, so maybe we don't need societal norms around this anymore?

I don't think that women cannot or shouldn't do something. I see they don't exactly enjoy to suck it up and do the job regardless of their body needs.

We as a society used to tell boys to „man up“. Now that's frowned upon (and that's good). But now we started to tell girls and women to „man up“ and ignore their cycles. And both are just as bad. At least we should give teenage girls and young-to-middle-age women few extra days off school/work in a month. Scheduling might become a nightmare with irregular cycles though. Dealing with menopause for significant portion of women is awful too. But I've no idea how modern economy could deal. Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.

I somewhat agree with you, but I think there is an underlying cause. We are generally not accepting of individual differences, needs, and commitments outside work. We have improved in some ways (e.g. with regard to making adjustments for disability) but there is a long way go.

> Besides giving them much more lax during that period in life. But on the other hand, if they get same pay, it's quite natural that their colleagues wouldn't be happy about it.

More "lax" working conditions all round.

I think individual specialty and massive group specialty is somewhat different.

For individual specialty (be it skills/abilities or lack of them), people can choose career or life paths accordingly. E.g. I’ve met a dead/mute constructions dude. He specialized in line of work where he works solo. If I accidentally wasn’t home while he was here, I wouldn’t have ever noticed.

On the other hand when you have massive groups with some specialty that match similar pattern… Over time it becomes a „norm“. It's not like some people decided what gender norms we should have a millennia ago and rolled with. It was rather a society trying to accommodate some groups of people with some skills and abilities and gender norms becoming a thing were a side effect.

As for more lax working conditions all round, it would be nice. But I’m not sure how modern economy would handle that in a fair way. And once you start institutionalizing more lax conditions for certain groups… I want to see that shitshow.

I think many men should be much and much more careful about lugging heavy weight as well. This never ends well for their health either.

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