In the Philippines, I have never seen a female taxi driver, plumber, construction worker, or electrician. Maybe there are but they would be very rare.
It was a surprise for me to see women doing these jobs in Rome when I visited last summer. Sure, the majority are still men.
Is it common in your area?
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There’s some, but it’s not common. There’s of course gradations in it as well. I’d expect a female taxi driver sooner than a female plumber for example. But they’re certainly out there and they’re becoming more common. Probably something like 10% of the truck drivers at my company are women for example. And a female friend of mine is an electrician. But I was still surprised when I visited Australia and saw that among construction workers, specifically road workers that I had the occasion to observe a number of teams of, there was a really quite high percentage of women compared to here where it’s still at least 95% men.
I once ended up in the same taxi as a very talkative female Cockney taxi driver who spent the entire trip bragging about how well she knew her way around the streets of London (“They call me Mrs Sat Nav”).
But yes, in general those jobs are heavily male-dominated here too. I’ve seen quite a few female bus/train drivers, but not as many taxi drivers.
I used to work in Uber, in my team the ratio was more or less 70-30
Never in my life when I called the service(which happened a couple of times) a female plumber or electrician came to fix anything in my house
Taxi driver, bus driver etc. yes. I’ve never seen or heard of a female plumber, construction worker, electrician yet, though.
In general it’s uncommon or close to impossible. It’s because those jobs are traditionally for men. I don’t know about taxi drivers, but the whole rest is for men. Men seem to be naturally more into technical stuff than women. In Poland we have *technika* (technical high schools), where you have normal subjects but you focus on practical classes about your speciality, e.g. electrician, cars, gastronomy, something like that.
I’d say that when it comes to stuff like electricity or cars, 99% of the students are young men. Women are just not into that, if they go to this type of high schools, they choose e.g. gastronomy or hairdressing. That’s just how it is. So obviously a female electrician is like a unicorn – you can picture it, but it doesn’t exist.
Construction workers are men as well, but it’s because they’re biologically stronger than women. If I had to choose a construction worker between a man and a woman, I’d obviously go for the man because it’s about physical activity, stamina etc. Women can’t beat men in this category.
On my IT studies in Poland we’ve got a pretty equal split between genders. In my current IT job there is only one woman in the circa 10 people squad. So men are still the majority, but seeing a woman working in my field here in Poland is definitely not shocking at all.
I also have a friend who is a girlboss at local constructions (as in she actually leads & instructs people in the actual constructing work). But this is a representative sample of one, so there is that xD
Turkey: Nope. Also rare to see female hairdressers (which is very common in other countries). In Turkey, the society is still segregated, and it is hard to get into jobs that are traditionally considered men’s jobs. Although, there are plenty of female engineers and scientists, so at least there we have more equality.
Not really in manual labor, but socialist East Germany pushed for equal representation in academia and you can still notice a difference to western Germany today in how many female researchers, engineers, doctors or architects and so on there are in eastern Germany. The general gender pay gap is also smaller in eastern Germany.