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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33914 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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There are lots of jobs where physical strength matters, and they're very gendered male.

But these jobs are proportionally much more scarce than 50 or 100 years ago.

There's quite a few "stereotypically masculine, requires physical strength" jobs that having hiring shortages right now. Construction labor, Garbagemen, police beat cop in cities, and Army grunt (not West Point officer) to name a few. This suggests that it's not like those jobs have completely disappeared leaving manly-men with nothing to do, it's that those jobs are now so low status that no one wants them.

"Everyone knows" that the way you make good money now is to study STEM or business and get a while-collar job, even if what you really want to do is use your muscles in the real world.

I can't help but notice that three of the four jobs you listed are public sector jobs, which may have something to do with them being low status.

"Everyone knows" that the way you make good money now is to study STEM or business and get a while-collar job, even if what you really want to do is use your muscles in the real world.

They're not wrong. If you can do the work you can make a lot more money in computer programming or finance easier than you can in the trades. It's not impossible to make big money in the trades, but sometimes it requires connections (they don't hand out those $400k/year backup crane operator jobs to just anyone), and when it doesn't it still requires business skills as well -- you have to run your own operation and have employees.

The stereotypically masculine jobs with hiring shortages now tend to either have cyclical employment (like construction) or be shit for other reasons (including being very low status and/or low pay, or all the baggage of the military)

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