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the-unpopular-opinions:

Anon plz, I’ve already heard it all. 

I like when people use “men working longer, harder, more dangerous jobs” thing as proof that they’re marginalized by society while completely ignoring the fact that they’re almost exclusively granted the opportunity to work those longer harder hours because women are still thought of as weak, incapable, and in need of protection. The best example is probably the American military, even if women want to put in the blood sweat and tears that it takes to rise to the top and get all the great promotions they can’t because the United States still holds onto that idea that letting a woman fight like any of her male peers would cause the country to crumble.

If women weren’t consistently thought of as weak, in need of protection, and good for nothin’ but babymakin’, there wouldn’t be any discrepancy when it came to the draft, who gets to ride in the lifeboat, child custody, and police brutality either! Funny how equality for women means equality for men too!

I know a lot of people talk about the wage gap without really knowing what it entails, thinking it just means “on average men make more money”. The most commonly used accurate example would probably be “the woman is the ‘secretary’ the man is the ‘administrative assistant”, identical duties, different salaries. My own brush with this was the first job I ever had, as a janitor one summer. They hired three students for the summer, me, another girl, and one guy. By virtue of being a dude, the guy was designated more capable somehow, given a different title and an extra buck or two an hour.

The idea was “having a dick makes you more qualified to use heavier machinery, and that means you deserve more cash”, and it meant that he would get to use things like the riding lawn mower, the rug doctor, and the floor polisher while the other girl and myself swept, mopped, and scrubbed things by hand. After maybe the second week on the job he broke his arm roughhousing with his brother or something like that, and was only able to complete tasks he could do one-handed. This did nothing to change his apparent “stronger and deserving of more pay” status, so the rest of the summer was full of fun adventures like the time he drove the riding mower over a stump and broke it, leaving the other girl and I to finish his landscaping with push mowers (that he couldn’t push due to his broken arm). Or the time he came down to have a nap in the room I was cleaning because his only job was to shampoo the rug when I was finished.

Believe me, had the requirements for the “harder” job been something beyond “Has Y chromosome” I would have loved to have taken the responsibility. The girl I was working with probably would have to. Honestly, she was probably the most physically capable of the three of us.