I don’t see any height minimum/maximums, so what do you mean by “oops”? Did I miss something?
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Yes, there are differences in the physical fitness requirements between men and women.
Not so much a privilege for a man.
Are you saying the female SS Agent didn’t meet the requirements required for her job? How would she have been hired then? Curious to know your source.
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It seems to me that agents that are providing personal security would have one benchmark for physical fitness and not one for males and one for females.
For most SS jobs though, I don’t think physical fitness would be as critical.
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You say “it seems”, which sounds to me like you have no idea.
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Let me try harder. Why are there different physical requirements for the same job?
If a specific job, like special agents on personal security detail, have physical requirements shouldn’t all agents meet the same requirements? If not why?
There are clearly two different physical fitness standards for these agents based on gender.
There is an easier fitness standard for women. That isn’t a question, it’s a fact.
This is counter to the idea of male privilege. The males are held to a higher standard.
In the end, if someone is working security at this level should the standards be the same? That’s a question for a different thread probably.
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According to the government’s Applicant Physical Abilities Test there is no different standard:
“An applicant must achieve a minimum cumulative score of 20 points with no zeros to pass the APAT. APAT standards are not specific to age and/or gender identity.”
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Interesting that people consider access to jobs with a long history of sexist hiring (LEO’s, military, construction, electrical, mining, etc) as being a burden for males rather than a benefit, as if women really lucked out by being kept out of those fields for all of our history.
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There are lots of jobs in the SS. I was specifically talking about special agents, those that provide personal security. They have specific requirements and they do differ between men and women. Link posted above.
If you look at the charts carefully, there are different standards for different age categories. For example, a much lower standard for a man in his fifties than a man in twenties. Does that bother you, too? Shouldn’t everyone be held to the same standard?
Maybe the entire point of the fitness test is that they want someone to be healthy and fit, not necessarily that they need to accomplish 30 chin-ups to do their job. I might be only able to do a few chin-ups, because women’s bodies are not built to do that without a lot of weight lifting, however, I can competitively stair climb faster then most men of any age. Perhaps the best Secret Service detail would be one consisting of 6’8” sumo wrestlers, that is, if their main job is to use their body to shield the official from bullets.
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Perhaps physical fitness standards can be its own thread. Let’s move the conversation forward.
I don’t known how well I’m going to say this but more women just pick up and respond to subtle emotional/social/environmental cues about what is needed by the actual people around them to a degree that most men just don’t. And that makes a difference in all kinds of ways. We’ve done it for centuries for survival and well-being of ourselves and our children, but maybe we’re tired now of the one-sidedness of it, and have just enough economic and legal power now to be more outspoken. I know “emotional work” has become a cringy catchphrase but there’s truth to it. It’s kind of many women’s superpower, but it’s also the thing that is so beneath the surface that men can go their whole,lives without fully realizing how much women juggle to accommodate men, children and every other priority, including, not just the obvious tasks but how everybody FEELS at the same time. We feel responsible for making it all work out, and we are HELD responsible if somebody is not happy about it, in a way I doubt most men imagine, The old “men work from sun to sun but women’s work is never done “:still seems to hold too true. Some men resist openly acknowledging such a thing as emotional work exists, and deride the idea. Other men claim to be sympathetic but resist looking at themselves and their own automatic assumptions and habits at home and with women at work. They covertly resist change by agreeing on a change and promptly “forgetting” in myriad big and little ways. It’s easier to flip off women’s concerns as trivial than to confront one’s own insecurities and limitations, (in which case we women tend to either enable the behavior, drive ourselves and men crazy trying to get him to care, or leave a given man or men entirely, as you can’t make a man do what a man refuses to do).
An unacknowledged privilege that men have is being able to swath themselves in an enormous degree of unawareness of all the small, nuanced things of maintaining projects, maintaining relationships and other details of life that women have always done outside of their awareness and men don’t have to be responsible for thinking about, , because it just seems to magically get done without him even knowing about the thing that was done, or why it was of any value.
Men sometimes say they’re put off by women creating problems where no problems exist. But that’s a little like a person telling a dog (who has about 10,000x more olfactory nerves) not to bark because all these smells don’t exist. That’s an exaggeration, but illustrates the point. We women are frustrated and sometimes enraged when men not only ignore things but tell us “nothing to see here” if we bring concerns up. I don’t know what is to be done if men cannot or will not be open to more transparent and genuine relationships with women.
I sincerely hope that’s not the case everywhere (feeling cynical lately). I have mostly wanted to believe there are good guys everywhere. It’s just that even the sincerely good men I’ve been around or closely observed still seem clueless and become absolutely rattled to have to face anything more emotionally complex than fixing a leaky pipe. IF they notice the leaky pipe! Let alone institutionalized inequalities. I’m not saying that a lot of men don’t want to mean well. But meaning well theoretically and being willing to walk the walk and listen to UNDERSTAND are two different things.
If men feel put-upon lately, maybe women are just TIRED of the one-sidedness of it all. The balance of power has been off for centuries. Most of the gains we made, we made despite men pushing against change, If young men are feeling they are falling behind, then maybe they should get out of their comfort zones and learn new things just as women had to do with little or no help. Maybe young men could also become more skilled at a traditionally feminine superpower (understanding, empathizing and responding to people’s experiences rather than belittling and dodging them) just as women have had to step up and learn new ways of being to get ahead.
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I understand that physical standards are a topic on their own, but I am trying to illustrate a point that some men here are disturbed by women not having to hold the same physical standards for a job as a man. Yet they are completely unbothered by the fact that older men are allowed to have lower standards than younger men, also. It all plays to the complaining about “woke”, no fair, etc.
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Men…
More likely to get drafted
More likely to be incarcerted
Have shorter lives
More likely to die before their first year
More likely to die by suicide
There have been many cases of my assuming a gender for a CC poster that turned out to be incorrect. But some posters, even when not sharing info about favorite bras or male-pattern baldness or some other gender-centric issue, signal their demographic status so loudly it can’t be ignored or mistaken. I’m afraid we’re still a long way from treating everyone equally, regardless of gender.
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I think if I was to start a conversation with my husband about his male privilege, he would instantly groan and turn me off. But if I started talking about many of the different things that I experienced as a woman (we have had the exact same career path for 37 years), he would likely be horrified and say none of those things happened to him. I never bothered to even mention most of it throughout the years, since I knew it would make him angry, and my tactic has always been to ignore it, laugh about it, try not to take offense.
But then I could end the conversation with, you know what? What you experienced was male privilege. Though I really wish there was a better term than that, as that seems to place blame on someone who isn’t at fault.
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To me it’s not about blame, it’s the failure to acknowledge that it exists which is the issue for me.
My husband is still floored when he hears what my daughter and her friends have experienced at work. Thankfully it’s becoming fewer and far between. But it’s good for him to hear first hand some of the struggles.
I was watching beach volleyball earlier today and one of the announcers commented about a player’s nice smile. There was dead silence from the rest of the announcing team and he back peddled quickly and made a joke about the teammate’s scowl. Just a reminder to the world that even at the Olympic level, men are judging athletes by their appearance and making comments on air.
It’s these little things, the comments, and attitudes that my husband is often quick to blow off but it permeates our world and not calling it out is a problem for me.
And it’s partly cluelessness on my husband’s part and also some defensiveness.
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My husband is a good guy but he can be clueless and also defensive.
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