For example, hardly any women work in garbage collection or for the canal brigade. One looks in vain for women in blast furnaces, in underground mines, as asphalt workers and as roofers. If the toilet is clogged, the car has broken down on the main road or the overland power line has snapped, who will come to the rescue? Almost certainly not a woman. Even when it comes to dying as a uniformed war hero for leaders, people and fatherland, men are given priority. In short: Almost all physically demanding, dirty and/or dangerous jobs are carried out by men.
If there is one thing that is definitely not at stake when it comes to gender equality, which is demanded with tiresome regularity, then it is equality with regard to a stressful job. In fact, it’s all about the money. Money that, according to anti-capitalist propagandists, perfidious entrepreneurial exploiters withhold from the weaker sex by treacherously forming alliances against women. It’s unbelievable what grotesque conspiracy theories the egalitarian faction is dishing up to us.
The Google search engine returns an incredible four and a half million hits under the keyword Gender Pay Gap. So the topic is hot. No wonder that politicians, driven by outraged media makers, feel compelled to intervene. Women’s Minister Susanne Raab declared on March 8th: “Today’s International Women’s Day reminds us that the fight for equality worldwide must not stop.” probably not in mind. Instead, it is simply a matter of cherry picking: more board positions for the lovely woman, more managerial functions, careers in civil servants or politicians, in short: well-paid desk jobs that are as prestigious as possible, but do not guarantee dirty work where you could ruin your carefully manicured nails.
But even if the feminists and levelizers in all parties do not want to admit it at all costs: in those democratic societies that have the highest degree of equality, such as those in the Scandinavian countries, very few women choose MINT studies (mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology) that are most likely to lead to well-paid jobs. Exactly where women are largely equal to men, the choice of career drifts more apart than in such evil macho societies as we supposedly have in the country on the river (see here).
Only in socialist planned and command economies, such as the USSR, or in Korea north of the 38th parallel, were and are high percentages of women found in typical male jobs. The fact that Ms. Raab and her fellow campaigners aim to increase the number of female mine workers and tractor drivers can be ruled out – see above.
Whatever individual ministers may wish, it is not the task of governments, at least not in free-market, liberal democracies, to educate people and dictate their professional career paths! The ladies and gentlemen politicians have no mandate for this.
If young women continue to choose to become hairdressers rather than toolmakers, that is none of the government’s business. If female high school graduates decide to study subjects that “have something to do with people” and leave mathematics, computer science and technology mostly to men, then that is their right. After all, it is responsible citizens who are entitled to vote who decide in favor of one or the other. However, since mechatronics technicians now earn more than retail saleswomen, and graduates of MINT subjects clearly find better paid jobs after graduation than sociologists, political and communication scientists, there is no need to whine about the unequal pay of women and men. Every woman is the blacksmith of her own happiness! No one is pushing women into the “wrong” careers. It is an insult to women when politicians presume to prevent them from making the wrong career choice.
Incidentally, the motive of the political class to campaign for gender equality is by no means altruistic. Because with their struggle for material equality, private employers are degraded to be the recipients of orders from the state bureaucracy on the one hand, and women to dependent clients who depend on the benevolence of the nomenklatura on the other. With the struggle for equality, the political class extends its power over the private sector and also creates a lot of unproductive administrative jobs.
Instead of worrying about the pink elephants in the living room in the Alps, which go by the names of Islamization, inflation and the impending inability to finance the pension system (the list is by no means exhaustive), the political class prefers to deal with orchid issues such as the gender pay gap it will not have closed in 100 years without the use or threat of coercion.