I’m a man, and I agree.
I was born out by Oswell st, when it was in the sticks. Bounced all around to Inyo, K st, Oildale, East Side, and others. Wound up on Greenacres Drive and married, where we bought our first house. Divorced, then kicked around some more, finally moving uo here about 20 trs ago. Good move, for this old school liberal. I’m still alive. 
My two grown kids still live there.
Roofers in Bakersfield. Can you inagine?
The military in both the enlisted ranks and officers has plenty of females. Enlisted females aren’t technically allowed to fight on the front lines but that becomes a moot point in our current wars where an attack can come from anywhere and they are still trained on the basics of artillery and combat. I would suspect that most young females that are inclined that way go for the prestige of the military and even fighting in a war. Most of them have regular military jobs in some mundane roles but lots of others do things like aircraft, ship, and tank maintenance that is definitely skilled trade work. WWII proved that women can do trade work easily when they have to but that was many decades ago and the effect faded fast after the war was over. That suggests it is due to preference.
Might be. In construction, especially, strength is time saved is money saved.
That still doesn’t explain why women with good eyes, hands, etc., are not more present in skilled, shop-type trades like tool and die making or cabinetry. Here there may be some kind of culture barring them - either chauvinism or (perhaps) some not very forgiving work ethic.
Women are overtaking engineering , medicine and law, and they are entering the trades, but lets face it, besides the heavy grunt work you can’t avoid are some physically uncomfortable situations including dirty work in the trades.
I may have missed it but I’ve yet to see Mike Rowe help out a female worker on his program.
Are you kidding? There aren’t as many women, but the vet with the llamas (or was it alpacas?) was a woman. I recall some fish gutters, candy makers, and one of those people who make parchment. That’s just off the top of my head.
A few years ago there was a woman who worked as an industrial construction electrician (contractor) at my place of work. She was about 5’2" tall and weighed maybe 120 lbs. We were friends, and knew each other pretty well.
Anyway, one day I was sitting outside having a smoke and heard a familiar sound. I looked over and saw her horsing a 20 ft heavy duty fiberglass Werner extension ladder up on to the rack on a pickup. I hollered “use a hand, Louise” and she hollered back “nah” and womanhandled that sucker on up there, turned, and made the two-armed muscle pose at me. I sure do miss her. 
Women can and do build up some good strength when they use their bodies regularly. I view one of the side-benefits of working in the trades to be the exercise. Some people pay to use the gym… I get paid to work out 
That’s true. Problem is, you get used to eating to fuel all that exercise. Then you get a little older and find a softer job, but don’t adjust your intake. Oops, what happened to my “girlish figure”. I call it the Chevron Spread. Guess who I work for. I warn the new hires, but it happens to them too.
Yeah, we women are great “attic rats.” 
My husband (electrician) tries to get me to play attic rat for him sometimes, but I usually decline. My rather slender brother has also had to play attic rat before.
I work for Ford, and the auto industry has a long history of apprenticing from within. In fact, until quite recently, our tradesmen weren’t expected or encouraged to get state certs or go for a masters, the idea was to train them on industry specifics and keep them but there’s been a big push the last five years to get everyone into certification classes and get them all licensed.
Anyway, they’ve been encouraging women to get into the apprenticeship programs for at least 25 years, but the numbers are still quite low. I began an apprenticing as an electrician 3 years ago and in a plant with 150 electricians, I’d have been the seventh female. Since then, one quit to stay home and make babies and two left for more secure outside jobs.
I take classes at a trade school in one of the local community colleges, in three years I’ve only been in one class with three female students, most classes I’m the only one or there’s one other girl. A lot of the older teachers still trip over themselves trying to apologize for the requisite coarse language used by nearly everyone in the trades, or for terminology like pipe nipple or coupling or male/female ends as if I’ll get the vapors if I misunderstand them.
There are still a lot of bullshit biases to overcome, I was told by more than one male coworker that I “took a man’s job away” and it’s a widely held assumption that minorities and females get extra points in the testing process that places apprentices. I’ve had older guys politely refuse to work with me, explaining that they’ve had issues with female apprentices in the past and even though they’re sure I’m perfectly nice and capable, they’re not interested in exposing themselves to potential harassment claims, etc. Some of the younger guys can be just as moronic, it hurts their fragile egos to think they’re not being chivalrous and carrying the heavy load, then they resent having to do the heavy lifting you never asked them to do. Younger guys also seem to be more apt to either shut the girls out of the joking and bullshitting at break time, or go out of their way to get incredibly sophomoric in a hazing kind of way. You can either suck it all up, or get labeled a bitch if you make any waves.
It can get really tiring having to prove yourself over and over, especially when you’re starting out and you really don’t know shit. Neither do the male beginners, but there’s more acceptance of them. I have female friends that work construction and they report much of the same, eventually you win them over but it’s playing that game every single new job assignment or crew.
mangeorge, how many times do you see young girls playing Daddy’s helper and learning basic tool usage? About as often as you see young boys learning childcare and baking? In my limited experience, if all the kids are the same gender they get a lot more generalized instruction from both parents, but if there’s a mix of stuff, the boys get the baseball mitts and tool belts and the girls get the baby dolls and easybake ovens. Exceptions exist, sure every family is unique, but kids wind up raised with traditional gender roles more often than not.
Queen Tonya, the flip side of that is that the kids themselves often don’t show interest in the other gender’s toys and activities. The argument that environment determines behavior has not fared well in psychology. The only place it still seems to carry much credence is in gender studies, where it really shouldn’t.
Some parents have tried promoting non-traditional gender roles with their kids. All of the children reject opposite-gender behavior, toys, and clothing at some point. Societal pressure is probably a factor later on, but as just about any parent can attest even pre-verbal toddlers who have almost no exposure to other kids have their own very definite opinions about what they like.
My niece, who spends most of her time with her father since he works evenings, rejects his more neutral clothing choices in favor of stuff that is girly and ruffly. She was doing that even when she was barely able to walk. She has toys from her older boy cousins that she ignores. Her favorite toy when she was still at the babbling stage of verbal development was an old cell phone. Not her father’s, which was also available, but her mother’s. She was all about huggable stuffed toys and communication from a very early age, and she didn’t even have other children around to play with until she was about two.
Feminist child-rearing may have fostered the metrosexual phenomenon, but hasn’t done much to promote more practical changes in gender roles.
That’s all true, generally, but it is of course a generalization. There are plenty of non-gay boys and girls who don’t fit those roles. Many who keep those preferences into adulthood. Nothing to do with feminism, though.
It is a good thing.
I’m not disagreeing with you, just discussing.
Kids definitely have preferences and inclinations, sure, and as they get older peer influences increase the difficulty in teaching them to branch out.
However, should my teenaged son cite gender preferences as a reason not to vacuum or learn to cook a meal, he’d be laughed out of the room. Basic tool usage should be taught along with cooking, cleaning, bill-paying, etc as part and parcel of the skills we try and instill in our kids. These are all things grown-ups should understand, but too many times it’s just too hard, we pick our battles, can’t pass on knowledge we don’t have, etc.
Well, yes and no - it is, after all, a generalization. While I certainly had girly toys, from a young age I also gravitated towards toy trucks and tools and preferred pants and flannel over pantyhose and frills. This carried into adulthood. Yes, I do have a feminine side, do enjoy some pampering, have skirts and dresses, etc. but most of the time many of my interests and clothing choices are traditionally masculine. Then again, that androgynous personality might be a reason I feel comfortable in the trades. Such personalities as I am are a minority and probably always will be - and I’m totally OK with that as long as we aren’t penalized for who we are.
Bottom line, as Queen Tonya says, is that there are some skills everyone should learn. After that, children should know it’s OK to be either traditional OR cross “traditional gender lines”. There should be equal opportunity with the understanding that in some areas there will not be equal results
Sure, YOU try to find a frilly pink dinosaur! (daughter is 3 and would adore one)
I’m 40 and I have to say, my experience is that mostly it is exposure and sheer strength. I can and do most things with minimal help. I’ve also had jobs that are traditionally male oriented (computers, poker dealing) and I agree wholeheartedly that the initiation process takes a while. I also rode a motorcycle.
The thing is, pretty much any guy can go to a job site (in a decent economy) and get a job, even if it is just manual labor. Construction especially is a fall-back sort of job for many. I seriously doubt I could stand outside the Home Depot with all the other folks looking for day labor and get picked.
I’m moving to a far more rural community and am considering what the job options are and in all honesty, it is far better for my husband than me. Toss in some old fashioned male chauvinism/traditional role stuff and well, that puts me as a cashier, secretary or waitress.
I wish I had been exposed to more tradesy type things, however, 22+ years ago, it was unheard of, hell, I caught crap for signing up for weightlifting instead of aerobics. Had I signed up for shop, well, I would have been tossed in with all the lesbians that played softball. 
Even though HVAC, plumbing and electricity are not always as “heavy lifting” as straight up construction, I’d imagine you do have to do quite a bit of heavy stuff when you’re at the early stages of breaking into those trades. The HVAC company sent a single guy to install my central air unit…I can’t imagine how any of it was easy, from lugging the compressor to dealing with the sheet metal. Even woodworking and cabinetry making have heavy lifting involved.
I think the bathroom issue that Broomstick brought up and the “going to a job by yourself” issue someone else brought up are also extremely valid concerns.
With regards to skilled trades at factories: My dad was skilled trade at Ford (having worked his way up from meager button pusher)… and while there were tons of regulations in place that let even the feeblest of old men do their jobs, the way my dad describes it is that the skilled trades were a ruthless boy’s club. I couldn’t imagine any woman wanting to work with those jerks - it was demeaning enough for any normal, somewhat sensitive male. I think they’re still getting over the idea of black people being able to get into the skilled trades, let alone women.
I definitely have no argument with teaching skills, or even trying to raise your kids without preconceptions about gender roles. My point was that the kids have their own ideas about it, and that there’s not a whole lot that you can realistically expect to change when it’s pretty obvious that a lot of male and female behavior and preferences are hard-wired. No harm in trying other than frustration if your ideals smash up against reality.
As far as gender-specific skills, there aren’t any. There’s usually no good excuse for refusing to do something because it’s “men’s” or “women’s” work. My wife is about 5’1". She carries her share of the things when we travel or go shopping. I do the heavy lifting because I can deadlift twice what I weigh, not just because I’m a guy. She likes organizing and filing things. I’d rather chew off my own arm most of the time than go through papers unless I’m producing something from it, like a report or article. Guess who keeps our records.
My dad was a manly man. Worked construction, had a plethora of tools, hunted, fished, etc. He still thought sewing was a useful thing to learn, though that might be because he found out that only a few guys in his unit could do it when he was in Vietnam, though almost everyone needed to at some point. I learned how to bake from my mom, and how to gut a deer with my dad. No issue from even my pretty traditional parents on the appropriateness of learning how to do things; everyone pitched in doing everything.
Thing is, regardless of upbringing, people gravitate to things they like or are good at. You can try to encourage women in non-traditional fields all you want, but the ones who actually take it up are probably never going to be a significant number. I don’t see the opposite happening much; encouraging men to go into nursing, teaching, or childcare, for example. But even if those fields were pushed, there probably wouldn’t be many men who followed those paths.
Anyway, we’re pretty much in agreement that while the ideal is that gender roles shouldn’t really matter, that might not always work out in practice. Like I said, doesn’t really hurt to try.
I’m not sure kids need to be exposed to other kids to get positive or negative feedback on their clothes or playthings. Offer up a Barbie the next time you go to a nephew’s first birthday. Take a baby out in a blue suit and watch how people react, then do the same in a pink dress. Even at that age, the difference is pretty astounding– ‘Ooh, he’s so strong!’ vs. ‘She’s flirting with me!’ I’d say once they catch a Saturday morning cartoon they’re pretty much gone.