I've never understood the whole 'the shittiest jobs' thing.

Lets leave aside CEOs.

What jobs do women who don't go into higher education tend to have and what jobs do men who don't go into higher education tend to have? For men you could say - well, labouring. Trades such as joining, plastering, building, plumbing, etc. What do the women tend to go into? Care work, cleaning. Maybe you get an NVQ and become a nursery nurse, a healthcare assistant, something like that. These are hard, stressful, depressing, often thankless jobs. Getting shouted at by people with dementia, bathing people, cleaning bed pans, changing nappies, scrubbing toilets. And it should be noted they pay a hell of a lot less than most labouring type jobs. Care work is one of the biggest areas women work in and it is also one of the least respected and lowest paid. I've heard it said that more men may be in waste disposal, but more women spend a good part of their day cleaning up human shit.

I know one working class woman who retrained as a plumber. She said it was hard - she was the only woman in the company, and guys used to disrespect her and give her shit for being a woman - but she was good at her job. AND she was so glad she managed it, and loads of people were jealous of her. Because she got paid A LOT more for the same amount of work that she did previously, and a lot more social respect. Sure she was getting dirty messing around with sewer pipes, but she wasn't getting paid barely anything to care for older people anymore and again - a lot of bodily fluids involved in that as well.

There are a lot of dangerous jobs that are mainly done by men, and that is something we need to fight against - its 2016, people shouldn't be dying at work, people are not expendable just because they don't make a lot of money. But I'm sick of this notion that gets batted around here that women don't do dirty, depressing, demeaning, shitty, underpaid jobs - that we're all cushy middle managers in 9-5s and receptionists reading Vogue and bitching in the staffroom. Those jobs are fucking gold-dust for a lot of women. Its bullshit and it makes it hard to have a reasonable discussion about under-representation in any area.