When we see the disparities between men and women, they're comparing all men in the workforce to all women in the workforce. If they tell you that the disparity is based on men and women working the same job, they're stupid or lying.
I just looked up how many female saturation divers there are, or have been.
I was curious because saturation diving is one of the highest paying jobs that a person can have; but, it is so high paying because it's physically and psychologically difficult, to say the least. You have to spend months of your life a mile under water without a break. On top of that, if one person makes a mistake at any point, your body could fucking explode -- just look up the Byford Dolphin accident if you have a strong stomach.
There's a grand total of one female saturation diver. She was hired in 2021.
This is a useful job. It's an essential job. It's also a job that I wouldn't and couldn't do. That's why these people are paid so freaking much.
Hazard pay is, and should be, a thing. It just so happens that men tend to take these jobs that are important for keeping the world running, which also carry huge risk. Men are orders of magnitude more likely to die at work.
Oh, women make $.77 to each dollar a man makes?
Men are twelve times more likely to die at work than women are.
Even if you take away the fact that men are more likely to join the military or become a cop, men are more likely to become saturation divers. Men are more likely to become electricians.
Have you been to a concert recently? Have to been to a sporting event recently? Have you been to any event at all recently? Were there lights moving around that were rigged in the ceiling of the arena? Yeah, people needed to get up there and do that. People needed to get on the scaffolding or the grid a hundred feet above the ground and risk life and limb to rig the lights and rig the speakers so you could enjoy the show.
The overwhelming majority of those people are men.
At no point will I say that women shouldn't seek any job. At no point will I say that women should be barred from any job.
I'm saying that we need to have perspective.
We need to understand that changing the bulb on a 2,000 foot tall broadcast tower is useful, and life-threatening, and a job usually done by men. We need to understand that oil, which makes the plastic, which is used in countless things that we use every day, often comes to us as a result of saturation diving -- a job almost entirely done by men. We need to understand that we can't live our privileged lives without electricity. Electricians, AV people, construction workers -- so-on -- could die at any given moment if anything goes wrong with the wiring or the order of operations. Again, most of the people who are doing this work are men.
If you're a woman, are you clamoring for any of these jobs?