this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Politics
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He's chosen his wording poorly, but there is a kernel of truth under his words.
There are tasks which are better suited to the different mental and physical attributes of men, just as there are tasks better suited to women. This has to do with biology, not society.
Yes, the top 10% of women can preform as well as the average man in physical tasks, but when we're talking about a whole society that isn't sufficient to cover the amount of jobs that directly benefit from these differences. If you hire 50% men and 50% women for a construction site, you're going to have a lower productivity than if you had 90% men and 10% women. The average women are going to swing the hammer more times for the same number of nails, they're going to carry fewer boards per trip, and they're going to need to use a ladder more frequently to reach work higher up. Society has said we can't pay women less than men, but they only look at it per hour, if they measured output per hour on this task specifically, that means average women would be more expensive to employ than average men. This is about efficiency.
It extends beyond just simple strength and height though, men are also more likely to take risks. This can cause problems in some situations, but it can also be beneficial in many tasks as they push harder to achieve more. Not just in physical tasks either, men are also more likely to start businesses which is a very risky situation and lots of them lose money on it.
I don't think society would collapse without men, but it would look a lot different than it currently does. Women would absolutely take up those necessary physical tasks, but they would need to have more workers to complete the same amount of work which would alter the overall balance of the economy due to the reduced efficiency.
This is an incredibly charitable interpretation of their comment.
You have a point that jobs should match the employees and generally speaking men are larger and more muscular than women, but you do know power tools exist, right? You also realize that output is not purely about physical capacity but also mental and emotional buy in? And that construction isn't purely about nailing boards in place but doing things in the right order at the right time with the right tools and planning appropriately?
I think you're making too many broad generalizations here and over stating the importance of gender on job performance. I think there are more salient points to be made about job seeking strategies between men and women and how that should affect hiring strategies and gender disparities in certain fields. Women tend to prefer more work flexibility (malleable hours, flexible vacation time, ability to make time to pick up kids from school etc) than men and women tend to be more risk averse than men and this is reflected in the jobs they choose and are recruited for.
Even with power tools, an average man can work faster than the average woman for many tasks. They're going to be the exact same in an excavator where there's no physical component at all, but when it comes to using a jackhammer an average man is going to be able to position and control it far more effectively than an average woman. Power tools make those differences smaller or non-existent for SOME tasks, but they do not make things equal in most tasks.
I realize construction isn't purely a strength thing, but it's a major component for most workers and even a 5-10% efficiency difference is quite significant across an entire industry. Construction is just a single example though, there are hundreds of jobs that have significant physical components. From the original comment about electrical Lineworkers, all the way to washing dishes in a commercial kitchen.
The ability to lift 40-50% more weight around on average comes in handy a lot.
I don't think I'm overstating the importance of physical attributes in terms of job performance, we're not talking about office jobs here. In physical jobs, someone's physical attributes will drastically change how fast someone can work, and often how safely as well.