America's most gender-differentiated jobs

boing
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The size diffrence, which is by no means consistent in individual men and women, didn’t cause the violence any more than racial differences did. The patriarchal systems that treated women (like slaves) as the property of men made the violence acceptable and institutional.

Culture.

Actually, those differences are also culturally conditioned, and not at all fixed.

"Psychologists long took it for granted that the male and female brains were fundamentally different. But in a landmark 1974 book, Stanford developmental psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed thousands of studies and found the opposite: By and large, there just wasn’t much data to support the conventional wisdom. Yes, men’s brains are bigger, but so are their bodies; aside from size, there’s no solid evidence of physical characteristics in the brain that are demonstrably male or female. A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.”

Consciously or unconsciously, girls are nudged away from activities that would help them develop spatial skills almost as soon as they’re born. As they grow, parents respond to their kids’ interests, quickly compounding what may start out as very slight biases.

“Parents are very invested in gender differences, and any differences between a son and a daughter tend to be attributed to sex,” says Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps, and What We Can Do About It.

Over time, “boy” toys reinforce skills that are proven brain boosters. Playing with Legos and blocks, taking a shop class in high school and time spent playing 3-D computer games have all been shown to boost scores on mental rotation tests."

http://m.nautil.us/issue/32/space/men-are-better-at-maps-until-women-take-this-course

A cursory examination of gender roles and cultural conditioning also accounts for differences verbal skills, and they are no more fixed that spatial abilities.

Edit:

Thats well and good.

Offering rationalizations and conjecture as reasons for gender inequity isn’t really helpful to anyone other than those who believe it is a good excuse.

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I’m not sure why it is that while I’ve done a lot of jobs that skew heavily male (farm labor, construction labor, carpentry/framing, software [is web development really software?]) I’ve received the most and most discouraging sexual harassment in the jobs that are more often female (waiting tables, elementary school teaching, office work). I know I’m just one data point, though.

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Why is it vexing? Are you as concerned with the disparity in Auto Mechanics or Accountants?

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No, it didn’t cause the violence, it enabled it when some douche in the dark recesses of the past decided to hit his wife. I am referring to an origin of the culture that has been pondered in sociology from the time of Herbert Spencer on.

I am rationalizing for a different reason. If we fight about ghosts or unchangable (barring genetic engineering) phenomena, we are wasting effort bashing our heads against that which cannot be changed. It is a bad fight. Nobody can argue that the brain is plastic, and that most humans can perform tasks aside from gender tendencies(my original Rosie the Riveter point is solid proof of that). But considering what we see in the data, can you honestly say that 99% of the mothers in America are in some way discouraging our daughters from working as mechanics? For that matter, are 98% of fathers teaching their sons that being a receptionist is unnacceptable?

It is fighting the wrong fight. We can actively encourage raising children in gender neutral situations, we can work against real problems in the workplace and world. We can accept difference and encourage folks who don’t fit those roles to succeed, in hopefully an environment that doesn’t throw stumbling blocks in their way. But lashing out because the ones who fit typical stereotypes just creates enemies, not allies.

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I don’t think you get to tell female-identified people what their fight is…

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Hey, in the end, not my place to tell anyone what to do, I have a hard enough time keeping my own shit together. I appreciate the enlightenment on where the bio vs. culture battle is so contentious.

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Image result for spit take gif

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Would it change the gender distribution? Maybe. Would it allow more people to work in less-toxic workplaces? Absolutely.

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I’ve been an auto mechanic, and I’m female. Did I get sexually harassed? Not really, because I was married to the owner. Although my day job paid for the investment in bigger, fancier tools and rent on a commercial pole barn, he was the owner, and I was only not harassed because I was the boss’s wife & wasn’t it cool she actually knew what she was doing? This attitude was because the other guys would quiz me incessantly, always testing my knowledge, because being a motorhead wasn’t a girl thing.

A few years after that, I went into computers full-time. I could write a book on the harassment, torment, and bullying I went through, but I loved computers and working with them paid a lot more than waitressing.

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Well not as much, certainly. I don’t know the facts on the ground and I don’t teach either. But, as it happens, I do teach computer science and so that’s something I can be vexed about.

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Hmm, sadly I don’t think “not trying to abuse” but preferring not to take basic measures to mitigate the damage to their workforce because they can do better financially by continuing to allow their workforce to cripple themselves is good enough.

Are they? No - see your quote above.

There was a time - far off in the distant past - where delivery lorry crews would consist of a driver and one or more loaders - and/or the requirement that the customer had to make the necessary arrangements for unloading.

I refer you again to your quote above.

You were the one who said it filtered out women. :slight_smile:

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“Exploit”.

They were willing to abuse in order to exploit.

OTOH, it is very easy to build an argument that exploitation is itself abusive.

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Umm… wouldn’t it have been possible to provide shoes with textured soles?

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Yeah, I’d say they certainly exploited - they wanted people of better than average physical ability, and they made no bones about that, and didn’t pay especially well for it. But the fact was that a majority of applicants could do the job(s) safely, and they had a lot to gain from making the jobs easier where they could. I’m not sure if Loki’s definition of abuse includes the fact that for many positions, it was difficult for most women to do so.

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Hah, as if. You had to provide your own gloves (though they had a vending machine that sold decent ones for a buck a pair, probably better for the job than what you’d find in a store). But no, I’m not sure any sole design wouldl help much in that situation. Maybe something like deck shoes with a lot of sipes in the sole - that design was in fact invented by slaughterhouse workers, to avoid slipping in blood. Pretty sure they also were providing their own boots, given they were free to cut up the soles. The problem I see there is longevity.

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Violence was just one means of control, along with laws, and religious texts. They were deliberately and intentionally imposed so that men could control women’s sexuality and therefore paternity.

It’s known that patriachy was an early institution, but not the first.

"Anthropological evidence suggests that most prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian, and that patriarchal social structures did not develop until many years after the end of the Pleistocene era, following social and technological developments such as agriculture and domestication.[13][14][15] According to Robert M. Strozier, historical research has not yet found a specific “initiating event”.[16] Some scholars point to about six thousand years ago (4000 BCE), when the concept of fatherhood took root, as the beginning of the spread of patriarchy.[17][18]

According to Marxist theories stated somewhat differently by each of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, patriarchy arose out of a primeval division of labor in which women took care of the home and men, the generation of food through agriculture; as capitalism developed the realm of production became monetized and valued and the realm of the home was never monetized and became devalued, and the perception and power of men and women changed accordingly.[19]

Domination by men of women is found in the Ancient Near East as far back as 3100 BCE, as are restrictions on a woman’s reproductive capacity and exclusion from “the process of representing or the construction of history”.[16] According to some researchers, with the appearance of the Hebrews, there is also “the exclusion of woman from the God-humanity covenant”.[16][20] The archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argues that waves of kurgan-building invaders from the Ukrainian steppes into the early agricultural cultures of Old Europe in the Aegean, the Balkans and southern Italy instituted male hierarchies that led to the rise of patriarchy in Western society.[21] Steven Taylor argues that the rise of patriarchal domination was associated with the appearance of socially stratified hierarchical polities, institutionalised violence and the separated individuated ego associated with a period of climatic stress.[22]"

Biology has nothing to do with the collective desicions that men made to control women in early societies. Violence perpetuated by individuals is one thing, but violence supported by laws and culture is entirely another.

We know that children recieve all kinds cultural conditioning, both implicit and explicit, from parents and family, media, education, and religion.

It’s not.

This conversation has been a study of cultural conditioning around gender. The idea that biology is responsible for gender inequity is not only incorrect, it’s a dangerous one that positions gender differences as immutable- an underlying belief that upholds the inequity as it is.

I don’t follow you here.

You’ve made some incorrect assertions and I’ve politely corrected them. There’s rather a wide berth between that and lashing out.

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I thought I was using your definition of abuse, i.e. continuing with working practices that they know and the workers know will end up with the majority of the workforce unable to do the work.

That’s not what you said above.

I’ll grant you your basic point - that there are more men who are prepared and able to submit themselves to physically punishing work for pay for longer and that that skews the figures.

As for physical abilities, I’m with the late lamented Pterry on that one:

The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

from Reaper Man I believe.

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That’s not my definition. In fact, it’s the opposite of my point, and is apparently the point YOU were trying to make.

There are many jobs where the majority of the work force is unable to do the work. Is that abusive or dsiciminatory if the reason for that is physical strength, vs training, intellectual capacity, personal disposition, having hands small enough to fit inside the soccer ball, etc?

What about the case of professional sports? Where’s the cutoff? How uncommon / high paying / critical / entertainment related / whatever whatever does the job have to be? Does it make a difference if the same job title has multiple positions, some with that requirement, some without? The job I did was not any harder than the tests emergency fire responders have to pass is, and there’s substantial risk of injury in that position… are you saying emergency response people are abused?

Which kinda points to why I don’t bother responding to your other multiquotes. I also tend not to take comical fiction seriously as a job market determining reference.

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Well, forgive for me pointing out alternative interpretations of the words you chose to use.

You provided the information that the work was so physically difficult that it meant that most people were unable to undertake it consistently without injury. You seemed to be under the impression that there was nothing further the employer could do to mitigate the physical demands of the job without damaging their bottom line.

I pointed out that I don’t think that’s a reasonable way an employer should consider the health of its workforce.

You disagree? Fair enough.

I think we’ve got different uses of “the work force” in mind. Looking at your reply, I think you think I meant all the potential members of the working population. I meant the people working for FedEx.

As in, FedEx (and most other employers, FedEx is certainly not alone in this) are quite happy knowing that the majority of the people working for them ‘now’ will not be physically able to work for them for more than a certain amount of time and will be leaving due to work-related health issues at some point before the end of their ‘normal’ working life.

They know that’s fine, because someone else will be around to take up the chance to ruin their health soon enough.

Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s not abusive.

As for discriminatory, I admit I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here:

If a job has a genuine requirement (whether that’s strength or anything else), then oddly enough those who have meet the requirement should be able to do the job regardless of gender or anything else.

Does that mean that there will be jobs where one gender or whatever may be more prevalent?

Of course.

Is that discriminatory? No.

Is it discriminatory if requirements are put in place for a job that are not genuine? If employers choose not to change working practices that mean that jobs have physical requirements that are not strictly speaking necessary? Yes, I think it is.

As regards fire-fighters, I’m not sure why they are relevant particularly but they tend to be an example of employees who get treated fairly well. Mainly because people get upset when fire-fighters get upset.

So while the tests may be physically demanding, their actual working conditions are usually set up (in Europe at least) to put as little physical and mental strain on them as possible. Given the job, that is still a hell of a lot of course.

I’m sorry if my quoting you annoys you. I find it useful to clarify which bits of what you posted I’m responding to at which point.

Likewise, I’m sorry if my attempt at injecting some humour annoyed you.

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