John Berry <berry.joh...@gmail.com> wrote: I think if as many women were killed at jobs, especially if it was the same > but reverse of the actual m/f ratio, there would have long ago been a > massive push to make these jobs safer. >
There *has been* a massive push to make *all* jobs safer! Read history, for goodness sake. Read about mining. Look at ships, heavy equipment, factories, farming. Injuries and fatalities are far rarer than they used to be. Women working in 19th century factories died at a higher rate than men do nowadays. For that matter, children working in factories and mines were killed so often that some British mines had a rubber-stamp form to fill in the names and pay off the parents. A rubber-stamp! Look up "19th century child labor" images on Google, and you will see things like this of both boys and girls doing dangerous heavy labor in mines and elsewhere: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Childlabourcoal.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_childhood#/media/File:Coaltub.png Obviously, in Europe and the U.S. it was traditional for men to do dangerous jobs. The tradition lives on because, as I said, you have to grow up doing these things or you are likely to be killed. No one can just walk up and start working in a farm or on construction. You will cut your arm off with a power tool. In countries where women traditionally did some kinds of dangerous work in some industries, such as Japan, the fatality rate was worse than men. Even today, women in U.S. industry suffer a great deal, although they are no longer in as much danger of being killed. In Georgia and South Carolina, most chicken processing plants are staffed mainly by women. Their lives are not at risk, but they suffer horribly from repetitive stress syndrome. They are poor because these jobs don't pay a living wage. Many are illegal immigrants. So nothing is done about this problem. Also, Members of Congress and state government elected officials are on record saying that repetitive stress syndrome does not exist, and these women are malingering and trying to get free money. I expect such elected officials have never worked a day in their life at any manual job in a factory, farm or kitchen. I wish I could subject them to a month working in these places -- or I wish I could subject their wives and daughters to that. You would see new laws and improvements overnight! Again, it will be a better world when robots do that sort of work. The only problem is that people will go from having inadequate jobs that do not pay a living wage to having no jobs at all. - Jed
