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Justice for Men & Boys 
P……ng down today. Just down the road four workmen (water utlities) are busy dealing with a burst pipe. I mused that working in such conditions seems rarely to be a female choice. Certainly not since my teenage when “Rosie the Riveter” was all the rage and there was a push to get girls into trades. In the intervening 50 years there have been endless campaigns of the same sort. Now of course we have a Gov. promising to build 1000s of homes. Oblivious it seems to fact that one of the crucial factors in the failure to do so for decades is a shortage of skilled workers. What experience has shown us is that whatever the incentives applied there has not been a shift in the % of females in the dirty, dangerous, skilled, lonely and “unsocial” occupations. Even in the continued “woke” recruiting for the army the female looks forward to playing women’s football. While the male looks forward to learning how to wire a house, a skilled trade.
At some point maybe someone will get real and simply target recruitment to trades etc. at the sorts of people proven to be interested. I think it completely unlikely that suddenly manufacturing, building, infrastructure etc. will suddenly appeal to the fairer sex.
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This reminded me of an analysis I read, some time ago before the Pandemic, which showed that there was a striking correlation between overseas deployments and female sailors getting pregnant. Pregnant Navy sailors reassigned to shore duty And in one of those statistical sleights of hand a similar article tried to debunk the same phenomena by pointing out that roughly twice as many male marines missed deployments for all sorts of reasons compared to the circa 3000 females missing theirs due to pregnancy. Of course this failed to point out that at the time less than 10% of Marines were female, and many of these were in support roles at home bases. Thus the actual story to the statistically literate was the disproportionately high number of female marines missing on overseas deployments. One presumes as the proportion of females in the US navy and Marine Corps rises their commanders have to take into account this significant effect in planning.
One can’t help feeling sympathetic to a 19 year old husband and father struggling with a long deployment overseas. Specially as the social pressure these days is to characterise fathers being away for work as being “absent” and uncaring. Of course I’m from the UK however educated in a future occupation oriented “secondary modern” we did “domestic science”. Partly as some went on to training and careers in catering but also because, as our no nonsense female teacher said, you’ll need to look after yourselves when your away working. This seemed perfectly logical as in a prosperous skilled working class suburb many “Dads” worked away on contracts, in other factories of large national firms, abroad for multi national firms. As we often “put up” visitors from countries buying equipment from the Firm my Dad worked for.
Though usually for days, weeks or a couple of months Dads were often “away working”. And indeed in the 80s this was still often the case for my contemporaries. It seemed understood that this was quite normal and not a sign the Dad had somehow decided to be “absent”. These days such things are treated as if the man has somehow deserted his responsibilities, even though such jobs and occupations tend to be more lucrative for him and his family. Indeed as I understand it in the US this young man’s occupation will have secured vital resources such as housing and free healthcare for him and his spouse and child.
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