Born and rest equal?

Born and rest equal?

Can Woman exercise all the professions as Man?

It was Simone de beauvoir who said "one is not born a woman.One becomes a Woman."("On ne nait pas femme, on le devient") When I read it first I was about 20 and I interpreted it to mean that through cultivated behaviour and training which makes her gentle, charming and beautiful she flowers into a woman. I thought it was a positive thing to do train oneself and become that kind of woman. Little did i realise that it was precisely this that Simone was criticising - the conditioning which makes a person forget her personhood and become the role of a woman in its various forms - the subtle process of objectification by which she becomes something useful and acceptable for a man to have and showcase.

In the past 50 years women have demonstrated that they are equally skilled when it comes to professions which require mental and emotional skills. The balance is tilted more towards the male of the race where it comes to professions requiring physical strength. There are people who argue that a woman is not designed to do as much physical labour. I am not sure if this is true. I have seen that women who work in fields have a lot of physical strength and energy. Our body gets adapted to the kind of work we do. I have seen that if women work out with weights they develop atheletic arms .Perhaps we have not trained our body to do the same kind of physical work that men have been traditionally doing and if we started doing them I think our physique would get adapted and we could become as efficient as them there too.

In this context I remember a placard I read in a news item covering a protest by women in France which said: "There is no Housework Gene!"("Le gène du ménage n’existe pas") I guess that goes for any kind of work. We are not genetically incapable of doing this or that but it is just the rules imposed by our mindset born out of generations of social conditioning.

What do you think - can Woman exercise all professions as Man?
(I am not asking if they should or not which is a different discussion altogether.)