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According to this link, carrying 1lbs of weight at all times qualifies for "medium work"... my clothing weighs more than that...
Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.
It includes, non-exhaustively:
The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".
Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.
I suspect that much of that can be handled. Workloads adapting for lifting smaller weights at a time where before the weights were as large as men could afford to regularly lift; using more teamwork; employing the stronger women who can actually lift 50 pounds.
So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.
And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.
Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.
Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.
Powered exoskeletons (sorry, physical assistance devices) are advancing quite rapidly already. A lack of cheap strong labourers might encourage that further, and even decrease injuries long term.
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This appears to me to be like the thing with "economically viable oil fields". If we run out of economically viable oil fields, we don't run out of oil. We just move on to the next most viable oil fields. Similarly, many jobs appear to employ primarily men at the moment because a) women are less efficient and currently not economically viable; b) many of those jobs are shitty and men complain less about them. That doesn't show that women are physically unable to perform those jobs.
There would be some productivity hit, but I struggle to see how the market that can afford to pay so many people to do so many vastly less fundamental bullshit jobs couldn't absorb that hit without total society collapse.
Look, there's constant attempts to get women into the trades. I see it all the time.
Women do start. Single moms, married women, lesbians. Only the dykes make it(and this is what the ones who make it call themselves). Not necessarily she-hulks.
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I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.
Like, say, after a war.
We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.
Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.
More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.
As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.
I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.
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