Women are not propping up society. The majority of your food was grown by men. The majority of your food was transported across the country by men. Your home (apartment) was built by men. The building you work in was built by men. Your water purification, your power generation, your internet infrastructure, all done by men.
If the next generation of men feels that working these jobs will never afford them the ability to buy a house, start a family, and retire, then don't expect these jobs to be filled by women, because women are neither willing nor capable of doing them in the vast majority of instances.
> because women are neither willing nor capable of doing them in the vast majority of instances
Preposterous. I see women in construction, utility and farm work all the time – and don't tell me that I'm just seeing the exceptions to your absurd rule all localized in my little slice of rural living where hospitals and clinics are desperate for any warm body to fill nursing positions. Women are more than capable of doing the jobs you're talking about.
I live in a rural area, but i have lived in Los Angeles and Seattle, as well as in other rural areas on the west coast. There's not a single woman on any road crew, linesman crew, tree crew, ditch crew, runoff maintenance crew, and so on - out here. One time i saw a caltrans crew that both had a woman operator and a woman flagger, so i know there are exceptions!
Yes, women probably can do the hours and days of work on all those crews. They just don't. Here's some more: Wrecking, oil drilling, fishing vessels (the large ones), mining, trash collection and the maintenance of the landfills.
Commercial drivers licenses are 20:1 male to female. I personally was in an area with a high population of commercial truck drivers and every one of them had a story about the - read solitary - woman they met who was also a CDL.
Again, women probably could do all of these things - they just don't. I know people like to cite harassment and the like as reasons; but having worked blue collar, you just get harassed. You either deal with it and do the job or you don't and don't. Anyhow, I just don't see the point of pointing out that a few women do some or all of these jobs.
For the record, i'm for women being included in the SSS in the US.
> Anyhow, I just don't see the point of pointing out that a few women do some or all of these jobs.
My point was more to address the claim that women can't do the jobs, when that's patently false and we can all see with our eyes that they do actually work these jobs right now. I don't mean to claim that the crews I see are 50% women and 50% men†. Obviously women work these jobs at a much lower rate than men do, and whether that's due to harassment or not is an interesting thought exercise but best left to someone other than me to chew on.
† One area that I do think is close to even is farm work, at least in my part of rural Iowa. Working on a dairy from age 14 to 20, and just living in the area for my entire life, I see (anecdotally) just as many women doing manual farm labor, driving tractors and handling livestock as I do men.
The vast majority of women physically can't do the jobs as well as a man can, that is a fact. Yes, the women you see working those jobs are the exception to the rule, and would in fact be outclassed by a man with the same level of training and experience.
You're making the assumption that the jobs require exerting oneself to the peak of human physical capability. If that were so, then yes, a man is going to outperform a woman — I don't dispute that men are just biologically advantaged in terms of physical strength. But most blue collar work doesn't require the kind of physical prowess that only a man can reach at the extremes of our biology. From my own experience with farm and dairy work, the vast majority of tasks and labor are well within the capabilities of women regardless of biology.
Have you ever worked one of these jobs? I have. The average woman is not able to carry two 70 pound boxes of cable up four flights of stairs, multiple times and all day long, for ~$18 an hour.
Yes, I have literally said multiple times that I have personal experience working one of these jobs. From age 14 to 20 I worked on a dairy milking 800 head of cows, feeding them, scraping their barns and bottle feeding the calves. We did it without air conditioning in 110° heat and humidity, and we did it without heating in -25° cold and snow, because no matter how much I didn't want to work, those cows needed to be milked and fed.
It was tough physical work, and believe it or not most of my coworkers were in fact women, including my own sisters when they were old enough to get a job.
If the next generation of men feels that working these jobs will never afford them the ability to buy a house, start a family, and retire, then don't expect these jobs to be filled by women, because women are neither willing nor capable of doing them in the vast majority of instances.