> There are extraction jobs going unfilled that start at $800/day. They're long days and hard work, but none of them require you to bench 450lbs.

Have you ever seen the work done on an oil drilling rig? Its a bit "upper body strength" intense. Some jobs will always end up categorized as the most intense upper body strength job; if not oil drill rig hand, it'll be drywall laborer or something else. And those jobs are too intense for most men, with the result that the supply is low and pay is very high AND the fraction of women strong enough to play along with the strongest guys in the world is essentially zero.

And its politically unacceptable to point out that WRT some physical characteristics like upper body strength, the graphs of male and female strength very nearly do not overlap.

Also there is intense societal/cultural pressure for women to be day care workers or whatever where 100% of women qualify at the skill of diaper changing.

I think the closest analogy of "only the very top physical condition making tons of money" that apply to women bodies would be female clothing model. Women models at the physical peak of perfection, think like top 1% supermodels, actually make FAR more than oil rig hands make.

Top 1% physical strength men only make $1000/day on oil rigs. The highest paid female model Kendall Jenner supposedly pulled in $22.5M/year in 2018. I don't think the problem is male sexism when women of similar physical quality to the men are making 10 times as much as the men...

From what I’ve seen - I wouldn’t want to be a woman in those environments. Culturally, these professions are way behind the times. Female mechanics drop out pretty fast from what I’ve seen due to the unwelcoming culture. Not every profession is like SV tech.

I will say that it also will really depend on the type of lady. Very few women are built like men are. You might be taking for granted just how much more physically strong men are on average. Just consider height for instance - average height of a woman in US is 5’4”. You’re in the 1% once you get past 5’9” as a woman (yet half of all men are taller than 99% of women). While there will be women who can do these jobs that have been built around a mans body - they won’t be very common until the profession is overhauled to accommodate different bodies better.

Lots of people talking upper body strength, but the real reason is because all of these are on site, some on the road, in situations with poor recourse for harassment.

You're right that there's a cultural fix, but it's big.