This isn't characteristic of U.S. factories; the costs associated with workplace injury are so high that employers are obsessed with near misses (i.e., non-injuries) and ergonomics (lever too high? We'll lower it. Reaching across your chest? We'll change your work station. Standing on concrete too long? We'll install ergonomic floor mats.). These companies employ men through their 60s. Women certainly can (and do!) work in these environments. They just don't do it in proportion to men.
That's kind of moving the goal-posts; we were discussing construction, which, at least in my experience, has a lot less OSHA oversight. Probably it is different in more unionized sectors as well; my experience is decidedly not - smaller logging, construction and power generation companies, where you often don't have the equipment to really do things correctly, for whatever reason, but it has to get done, and so brute strength and ignorance are resorted to.
> Those other blue-collar traditionally masculine jobs have a hard dependency on brute strength that most women can't satisfy.
We were discussing construction in the broader context of blue-collar, masculine jobs. But it doesn't matter really, because if these physically-permissive jobs are still disproportionately male, then there is no reason to believe that the physical demands of construction are what keep women away.
