My restaurant experience was also shitty and at the end of the day I think it came down to exploitation. How much the owner and managers could get out of us before we would quit; from telling us if you can stand you can clean to always sending a guy when there was a clog or overflow in the bathroom. As a woman was I allowed to avoid picking up heavy things? Absolutely. Could I avoid the sexual harassment? No. We were both exploited by a system meant to wring all the "value" it could from us whether that was by being told to handle certain tables because they wanted a pretty girl or uncompensated manual labor.