Men earn more than women in eight out of the ten most common jobs in Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises. The wage gap ranges from 3.7 percent for administrative employees to 14.3 percent for warehouse workers. There was no change in the average wage gap in these ten positions in 2023 compared to 2022. On average, men earn 6 percent more, the MKB Kennisplatform reported in the run-up to International Women’s Day tomorrow.
I can tell you’ve never actually worked a blue collar job.
Both factories I’ve worked in are evenly split 50/50 between men and women, but men are the ones that get to be supervisors while women stay in production. The main difference is that 90% of these women are migrants so they don’t shy away from hard work the way USians do.
It’s all socially constructed, there’s no biological imperative, and it’s extremely obvious if you go to any US factory.
Or go to any farm that uses migrant labor. Same story there, the fields are filled with both men and women. Or slaughterhouses or meat packing plants or many of the other dirty jobs where US-born workers are a small majority or in the minority. Women born in the US are socially conditioned to avoid these jobs and to instead pursue service jobs and other female-coded labor like hospitality and education and nursing, but women who immigrate from Africa or the Caribbean or Latin America don’t have that choice.
But… there is a massive world outside of USA. Antiwork is not focused on USA. And biology plays a massive role in how and why men openly pick jobs that women are selective and risk averse about.
What kind of factories are they? Do they carry risk of fatal injury or death? Do women pick uncelebrated and frowned upon jobs as much as men do?
I do not live in USA, but outside of it, India, where struggles are galore.
Literally read Capital Volume 1 and note how women are put into degrading and dangerous conditions.
You don’t get to “pick” jobs in a factory setting, you are assigned work and you either do it or get disciplined.
Women are operating heavy machinery, lifting and organizing steel parts, operating power tools like grinders and air guns, working with welders and powder coat ovens, and everything else that men do on the production line and at production stations. The difference is women have to stay at the bottom and don’t get to be supervisors or managers or shift leaders. At best they can become a team leader, someone who barely makes more than anyone else and has to do basically every job that needs doing when there’s staff shortage.
“Biology” doesn’t cause men to like risky jobs, they’re socially conditioned to undervalue their own health and comfort for money. You don’t see rich men taking risky jobs! That’s for all of us on the bottom of society, because we have few choices. Blaming biology for what is very obviously a product of capitalism is absurd. After reading Capital Volume 1, read The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State.
Also? Sex work, the oldest profession, carries a huge risk of fatal injury and death. It’s uncelebrated and frowned upon too.
Yet women dominate the work in that field. Why?