Women are more than able to do manual jobs and it’s very common that they do. Strange ideas about gender roles are coloring your perception of what is normal.
I think this is still true of the West though. I have spent many, many years in Southeast Asia, and construction sites there are 50% female — I think it’s a stretch to suggest that’s normal in the West though.
That said, certainly in Thailand commercial driving is still very, very male dominated, and job ads will explicitly insist on men; I’d estimate less than 1/100 motorsai drivers I’ve seen were female, and 90% of those were “Tom”[0].
Thailand's construction workers generally come from Cambodia or Myanmar. Not even Thai. Gender not relevant if they do the hard work for low pay.
Female motosai (motorbike taxis) more than 1%. Really only a thing in Bangkok, where organized gangs run the motosai according to territory. Definitely mostly men doing that, and food/parcel delivery. I would guess that results from Thai women finishing school and attending university at a higher rate than Thai men, which leads to better jobs. Motosai sit close to the bottom of Thai jobs in prestige, pay, and education requirements.
Yup on point. When I worked in Singapore their workforce seemed to be exclusively Indian/malay/indo transitory workers, saw them loaded into the back of big wire-cages utes every morning driving to their worksites, don't think I saw a single chick on those trucks.
It's a complex issue though, and the reasons for and current state of play varies _so_ much between countries that it's not even really worth comparing tbh.
"Very common" not from what I've seen. Would be awesome if they did get more involved, from my perspective.
https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d... and plenty of other sources if you search for it. Which is kind of interesting because most searches result in the "gender pay gap" stuff, yet they kind of answer their own question with the stats.
I think there are a couple of outlying issues even these days:
1: "boys clubs" some men trying to get women to not work in certain industries (although sometimes just men working together is perceived as a boys club, in the tech industry I've seen male friendship/camaraderie killed because it's seen as "boys club-y" even though anyone's free to join)
2: women may or may not choose to work in certain industries, even if it's 100% possible for them to do so
3: societal pressure (from both men and women) on women (and men) to fill certain roles/be perceived certain ways in society.
