“Why don’t more women get into trades?”
“Rampant and extreme sexual harassment and pay inequality.”
"Ahem! I said why are girls bad at trades?"
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My work is related to construction, and i can probably count on one hand the interactions i’ve had with female project managers and superintendents. Honestly it’s a huge bummer to me because construction is a lucrative industry and women aren’t being welcomed to it easily (at least here in Austin TX).
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Well howdy neighbor!
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The head of all capital development projects at the Philadelphia Airport is a woman.
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It’s not just Austin, it’s everywhere. In more than 25 years in my profession, I have had exactly one woman superintendent on any project. She works for a construction company that gets a lot of University of Michigan projects, so I’ve worked with her a handful of times.
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That’s good to hear. On my side of things my company has a lot of women in management positions, which gives me a lot of pride. Sadly though our crew and the inspectors that oversee them is all men. Since i’ve been here i’ve only known of one female inspector in our company and she’s since moved to another dept as a manager, she’s great at what she does.
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Endometriosis, ectopic pregnancy, preeclampsia are all way too prevalent. It’s fucking horrific that more money has been spent to develop multiple flavors and colors of boner pill than on women’s health.
VERY personal story. If my mom had lived in modern Texas instead of where I was born, I wouldn’t exist. Before I was born, she had an ectopic pregnancy that left her with a 0 mm Hg blood pressure at one point. She was on a continuous blood infusion for over an hour before they could get the bleeding under control. The intervention that saved her life is illegal now in many states.
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There is no end to the horrible victim-blaming things that people say about how domestic abuse victims-survivors should have “seen the signs” and “got out sooner”:
- “She should have seen red flags earlier”
- “She should have left at the first sign”
- “She should have chosen better”
As someone who has researched domestic abuse for many years as a university academic, I don’t believe these ways of thinking are correct or helpful.
In fact, I wish we could dump them all and never think of any of them again.
In this post, I’m going to explain what’s wrong with these kinds of responses and what we should be saying instead. This post is free to read, so share it far and wide.
Domestic abuse perpetrators — the numbers are massive, the scale is vast
Most of the ways that societies encourage people to think about domestic violence and abuse come from the wrong perspective.
People are encouraged to scrutinise and blame individual victims, rather than looking at how our societies are set up in ways that are creating far too many perpetrators.
As you might be able to tell, I’m a sociologist by training. This is really useful to me (and hopefully to you too), because it enables me to break out of looking at what individual victims-survivors did or didn’t do, and to instead explore the social problems that are fuelling domestic abuse and shaping the options that people have available to them.
Our societies create vast amounts of people (the large majority of them men) who want to coercively control and domestically abuse their partners and families in ways that are incredibly harmful.
So, how many perpetrators are out there?
Our societies typically don’t like to collect data on the numbers of coercive control or domestic violence and abuse perpetrators within populations. Statistics are almost always victim-focused. We know that around 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 women are subjected to domestic abuse in their lifetimes. That’s a huge number of victims-survivors. This tells us that domestic abuse is incredibly common.
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I’ve had a related conversation about this with my partner. As a man i could give her some context about men’s predatory and abusive behavior, even men that are friendly “nice guys” can be problematic. She was frankly appalled, and if we weren’t together i’m pretty sure she’d be single 
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Might be that my job exposes me to the worst my gender has to offer, but I am increasingly of the opinion that men suck. That does not make me very happy, being that I am one, but evidence is overwhelming that those who do not suck are a distinct minority.
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Yep, the patriarchy does tend to do that to men. Given that it also empowers men, those who avoid what amounts to patriarchal indoctrination are much appreciated.
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I’ve struggled with masculinity and male identity my whole life, i’ve talked about it at TOP and here at various points in time. I do identify as male. no doubt about it, but i struggle relating to most guys and doing typical guy things. That’s not to say i can’t be friends or friendly with men but it’s not as natural and easy as when i have conversations and friendships with women.
Thankfully i can say that i have known good men, but from a woman’s point of view it seems so difficult finding a guy that isn’t a POS. Especially these days dating is pretty fraught.
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This. It was particularly disheartening that, when reporting workplace harassment, discrimination and abuse to a mostly-women HR department, their reaction has been to downplay and/or cover up.
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