Great, thanks. I love hearing from people actually doing these kinds of jobs. I have only done physically demanding work for a limited period. I worked in a warehouse for a few weeks which I absolutely hated. It did tell me something interesting about physical size though. I remember this tiny Vietnamese guy. I was much bigger than him and younger, yet he moved cargo faster and with less affort than me. Not to mention he actually enjoyed the work while I hated it.

Then I served in the cavalry and later in the royal guard as a soldier. I got to see more women doing a typical mans work. That experience left me with many mixed feelings. On the one had I did think many of the girls were not suited for the job.

As a guard at the royal palace, you have to have a certain size to potentially deal with people causing trouble. And when out in the field carrying heavy gear it can be taxing even for guys of average size.

But having said that, I was impressed by the endurance and dedication of many women who seemed to have everyting going against them in terms of physical size and strength. Many wanted to actually be there. Unlike today in Norway, serving for women back then was voluntary. Me on the other hand was not there my own choice and frankly hated every day of the service. What you like to do has to matter. If a smaller and weaker girl enjoys the shitty job more than me, then let her do it.

The other thing I noticed was just how much crap women got in the military and how much toxic masculinity abounded in the military. As more of an intellectual guy, I think the military could do very well with more of a gender mix, simply because the culture gets so bad with only men. I remember the only thing that seemed to count as "literature" in the army was porn and comics.

I don't have any illusions that we will ever have a 50/50 gender split in every profession. Nor do I think that should be the goal. As you say I think there are some natural differences between men and women which are hard to get around. I also see that in intellectual tasks. I work in software engineering and a lot of that fits guys more than girls. Guys can be more single minded and obsessed about technical details.

But having worked with several women in the industry, I also have many counter points to that: Mixed gender workplaces have almost always been better than guys only places. That applies to women only places. My wife could not stand working places with only women.

Women often have different strengths and focus which complements men well. In the software industry men may generally be better and solving tricky technical problems, but men are generally terrible at documenting their work or writing readable code. Women on average tend to be much better at this. Women also are generally better at team work. Men have bigger egos that often clash. Women are also generally much better at social initiatives which help foster team spirit and make the workplace nicer.

A lot of guys in the software industry are borderline socially dysfunctional. I remember the first female manager I had: She asked me how I was doing. Nobody had asked me that in years. I got to put that in context: "How are you?" isn't a normal greeting in Norway, like in the US. In Norway it is a genuine question about how your state of mind, life etc has been the last couple of days. You are expected to give a little rundown of how you feel about things.

Basically what I am getting at here is that I think you can create a system which is better than the sum of their parts. Maybe you cannot get 50% women in the software industry, but if you just got say 20% it would in my opinion lead to a much better and happier workplace where everybody works better.

I suspect much the same about blue collar work. 50% women is unrealistic, but say you got to 10-15%, that would probably be a net positive. And even if women are not as strong they may put more attention to detail and respect safety more. Creating a better safety culture may be easier with more women in the workplace.