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.
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?