Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one

I don't think this is unique to Women at all. There's a tendency in these authors to perceive Men's interactions in the workplace as "easy" or "natural" or even desired for some reason. They typically aren't.

> Stoicism is a workaround to credibility.

It also comes with a high price. Those who pay it typically do not last. Ironically they often refuse to recognize the source of their suffering. If the job is hard, modify the tools to make it easier, your class of use just hasn't been typically considered but it wouldn't be impossible to create.

> The pontificating metal-shop customer should be, too.

It's everywhere. The number of times my credibility has been assumed based upon my appearance is huge. Customers often have to choose between two Men if a Women isn't working, and the same tropes apply there as well.

It all seems like the right idea for the wrong reasons and so the interpretation is heavily compromised by it.

I’ve been a tourist in a number of different trades, and welding beats them all for hostility and resistance to safety practices. You get called a pussy for wearing a mask, but of course the manganese fumes from welding steel will give you brain damage. I’ve been advised to run cutoff wheels far above their rated RPM, which risks explosion. It’s sad because welding might as well some combination of knitting and calligraphy but with metal. It’s great.

Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target. Thin bloke who doesn't look strong enough? Ginger hair? Tall guy, short guy? Weird tattoo, etc. Definitely the one black guy or the one white guy is going to get shit. But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.

The other thing, which in my experience is relatively common worldwide, is that working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics. In academia and in highbrow society the tendency is to basically sanitise every social interaction. When you're in an environment where that isn't happening then you can't suddenly ignore it any more.

> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics

I'm curious to what you mean by this

Makes sense. I suppose if women had invented these things, they would have been able to name them something nicer.

I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc.

Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.

This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.

I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.

Couldn't agree more!

I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).

There's a lot of actual prejudices (not just banter) among, say, "educated" tech industry workers, too.

Including sexism, racism, ageism, and classism.

Most people will at least superficially hide it in modern workplaces, but it's still there, and having effects.

You've probably seen evidence of this places you've worked, and you can also see it often in pseudonymous HN comments.

I’ve also seen this. There’s more of an acknowledgment: that people will be attracted to each other (or not),the status/dating games people play will be out and open. It will be acceptable to talk about physical/sexual qualities of your coworkers, etc. That when you are in physically close proximity you might see each others sexual parts and comment on them. It will be understood that after a breakup people will be less amicable.

You can also see this in literature: look at Les Miserables. In the factory they talk about sexual fantasies of the foreman. Whereas in the context of the upper classes it’s talked about in context of love/romanticism.

Contrary to popular believe, I find this much healthier. Emotions expressed can be dealt with and moved on. Emotions suppressed grow and fester. If it’s normal to talk about who’s is attracted to who, then everyone is aware of the sexual exploits of the general manager. Therefore people know where to set boundaries. If it’s hush hush kept quiet then the exploits of the Gm can grow.

Lighter batteries and brushless and mass production allowing for a quick jump in and companies like Ryobi's making tools look good (but not cliched pink) and how-to's on TikTok have changed the landscape.

We have gone from upkeep at home to asset building.

Some of this will go to careers, but it's not that simple.

HN isn't mature enough to discuss this but men die in dirty jobs, no one really cares. For every one who dies many are hurt and for the many injuries there are many many near misses.

A near miss is often about reaction times and strength. These 1% issues are the problem. You are 3 hours from anywhere and stuck in mud by yourself and the tool kit is missing. So you can get the 5.3% up, but it can't be 50%

What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).

Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.

Just that it's "universal" doesn't mean it has to be that way. For fucks sake we all exchange 40 hours a week (or more) to our employers, on top of overtime and commute. There's no reason at all anyone should have to put up with unprofessional abusive/discriminatory bullshit from anyone, no matter if customers ("Karens") or coworkers.

At least the young generation got the message, this time they have the numbers advantage to actually demand meaningful change, and we're seeing the first effects of it - particularly in the trades, that fail to attract new trainees despite pretty competitive wages.

(The next thing I'd love to see on the chopping block is corporate politics, it's utterly amazing that everyone knows at least one horror story where endless amounts of money were wasted, sometimes entire companies sank because two middle manager paper pushers thought their fiefdom wars to be more important than the success of the company at large... but apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit)

"Safety" was "watch the fuck out and don't get hurt." I didn't have access to a respirator even if I had known enough to want one.

I did have enough sense to listen to the old guys who said your body can't take that kind of work for more than about 15yr without starting to break down, and that I should go to engineering school instead.

There was one (1) female welder that crew of at least 20 and she put up with a ton of overtly horrible stuff. She was also incredibly good at welding, I saw her once burn an entire 7018 rod without looking, no helmet, just by feel, and the slag came off in one piece.

I will say that, at the root of it all, we are who we orbit.

Instead, what you could do is think about how this is a completely arbitrary thing that the two cultures just do differently, and that maybe people shouldn't be offended by friendly banter that isn't meant to offend.

The idea that sexual innuendos somehow differently affect men and women is rather strange.

pretty much all weird gender dynamics happen in upper class and posh environments. You won't find women on a farm afraid to get their hands dirty or men afraid to stitch something. People just do the jobs that are necessary. The entire idea that women are too pristine or fragile to do any work is basically an upper class fantasy because no working class household can afford to operate like this.

Whether its the military, manufacturing or agricultural environments, anywhere that's sort of blue collar or practical people aren't obsessed with their differences that much. I grew up in a rural environment and as kids boys would play with girls, as teenagers we'd go skinny dipping, there'd be none of the weird neurotic and insecure interactions I encountered when I went to university. There's entire categories of stereotypes and boxes highly educated and "high status" people invent to separate themselves in, not just along gender lines.

It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.

Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.

Blue collar work sucks ass. You generally only do it because you don't have any better options.

They rarely know anything about what middle management is doing. After all, if you own any stocks, do you know anything about the middle managers in that corporation?

Sadly, in our modern world people are not only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.

I think it's the betwixt and between dynamic: working class folk know they're living on what they have coming; upper class folk know they're living on what they have; but middle class folk, no matter how they live, are only middle class folk if other middle class folk agree they are — hence the insecurity, and at one reason for the conformity.

(in the UK, I think U vs non-U started as a joke, yet was popularised by exactly the people it had been meant to be taking the piss from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English )

I was once in an environment where, depending upon how I was dressed, I would either be addressed in english and called "Sir" or addressed in spanish and called "Paisano".

Why was the community surprising? (I mean, my mental model is that most dyadic social interactions can be approached with either authority or community, so I'm not surprised that groups without much authority tend to play the community card instead)

Would guess only 5.3% of YC readers are female. And would say, it's posh, not "real world," and it's not comfortable even though I'm a very strong woman - and a welder.

You don't even need to be inappropriate to have workplace banter. Nobody ever said that a light environment has to be built on jokes that bust chops. In fact, busting chops kind of blows. There's plenty of room for clowning around outside of that, and plenty of ways to build camaraderie, too. You don't have to bring racism or sexism to the table to have a good time, and you don't have to have a good time at someone else's expense.

Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. We should be making more skeleton jokes and showing each other macaroni art pictures.

> Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead.

There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.

No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor

> only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.

It's one thing if you or someone else personally enjoys some recreational conversational sadomasochism with the right partner, likely you can even persuade people to accommodate you with talk like that.

But the idea that there can't be genuine offense, only motivated offense attributed to some handwavy goal is clearly more projective pretense than anything like actual insight.

It's obvious why an uninvited conversations are perceived as a sexism.

But anyone with the experience in almost anything but particularly in any trade would tell you what men do receive uninvited conversations with men bent on signaling their expertise all the goddamn time.

Sure, seeing 'a woman out of place' triggers some of them to do it when they wouldn't do it with a man in the same place, because they could get told to shove their oh-so-important opinion to the place where sun is not shining, but the source of this behaviour is not to be a sexist asshole but just being an asshole.

As the other comment rightfully notes, any difference is going to be a target.

How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.

Dudes in dangerous professions bond by calling each other slurs which is ok because they're all in on it, such that if you can't handle some bad words how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs, so you're either not cut out for the job.

You as an outsider from the nice people bubble don't have a say in this to lecture them since you're not in on it.

Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.

And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.

Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.

HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules.

It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.

People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.

> everyone is picked on. If you don't get picked on that is reason for concern.

By quoting this, do I mean to encourage bullying? No, as the kid that wasn't included during my first years of school, NO.

But there is a difference between everyone calling each other names vs everyone calling someone names etc.

BLS is combining solder/brazing with welding. And has no concept of industrial vs fab, etc.

I keep wondering if Kurtis from Cutting Edge Engineering will eventually borrow the camera and have Karen do some gouging, metal deposition, and/or MIG welding on stuff to show how fun it is. Also, the combination of liquid nitrogen and flame for interference fit parts is pretty cool too.

Welders don't really like their plastic testicles.

https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/clippings/swearing-is-becomi...

Swearing and language rules are “made up”. The idea of harm is programmed into us.

People don’t riot despite receipts for priests molestation. They don’t riot over social scandal after social scandal. They’ll riot when they can’t feed their families. Most on the planet aren’t as obsessed with the pristine syntactic structures like the HN crowd. They never asked to exist and just want to live in conventional terms and die.

Like religion it’s just made up constraints; biological tick some all seeing eye will get mad.

Ugh. I’m a total hack and can do better.

There is no reward for macho or risky behavior, only a painful/miserable death and shorter life, and less time with family. So many male members of my mom's extended family died early from tobacco use and from industrial and agricultural hazards.

That means breathing fumes, unknown substances, or fine dust without a respirator (or smoking), not using gloves while handling chemicals/coatings/etc., or putting oneself in mechanically risky situations.

TL;DR: Just use PPE.

They cost money, they're a hassle, they're not fashionable, their benefit isn't immediately obvious but so is a seatbelt until there's a known problem like DDT, asbestos, tetraethyllead lead, dirt particulates, or fiberglass.

You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.

That is the point of the banter: to see how you handle stressful situations.

Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.

Why? For every accident, there are around twenty near misses. For every near miss there are several situations that could have gone bad very quickly unless the person on the spot remains calm and acts rationally.

It is essential to know how you behave under stress in most blue collar work. They're not being assholes for fun; they're doing it to save lives.

If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.

Unless there was more to it the correct answer is along the lines of "yes thankfully" and then a laugh.

I'd recommend a good look in the mirror when looking for the problem in such situations.

Same goes for the thing about trying to discreetly notifying that someone has dirty hands:

Yes, I don't know what is up with Americans and demanding everyone has clean hands at all times, but as long as that is a thing this probably is meant as a favor. Maybe clumsily, but still.

More generally the saying: "when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras" comes to mind:

If you expect things to be meant funny or helpful (and give people some slack) maybe life becomes a lot less stressful than if everything has to be seen through a lens of gender dynamics.

And if one is known as a reasonable person, I guess people will also take your side if you have to be loud and clear about something, e.g. if it turns out someone wasn't just clumsily trying to be nice or funny.

And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.

Brother and I bought and old Chevy. Front end parts so badly worn that could turn steering wheel about 20 degrees before the wheels moved!

Used bumper jacks to raise the front end and rest it on concrete blocks. Took out everything from the steering wheel to the front wheel. The springs were dangerous -- kaBOOM!

Took the worn parts to a Chevy parts department -- they enjoyed helping a teenager do it yourself, first time.

Installed the new parts: Had no spring compressor so used two bumper jacks; had them supporting the car while also using the jacks on the lower A-frames to compress the springs. kaBOOM! as one of the jacks slipped, the spring expanded, the lower A-frame rotated ~180 degrees and hit near the center of the frame (but not me!).

Drove the car to our Buick dealer (family car was a Buick) to have the front end aligned. Mechanic was surprised and pleased to see the work done -- all nice clean parts correctly installed! But he said he couldn't do the alignment because he needed a bending bar for the king pin (vertical heavy iron bar connecting the outer ends of the lower and upper A-frames) so sent me to the shop of a friend. The friend said "Bet you got these nuts too tight ... no you didn't. How'd you know to do that?" Had read a maintenance manual at the city library. He said "We get those manuals ..."!

Shocks were part of the upper A-frame pivots and poor. At a parts shop, got two piston shocks that looked about right, were officially for some Mercury car, and drove to a muffler shop for the needed welding. The shop was pleased to help a do it yourself teenager and with a challenge well outside their usual welding. So, with some fabrication and welding, they got each shock attached to the frame and the front side of the lower A-frame. Worked great for years!

Lesson connected with the OP: People can like helping a teenager do it yourself, alone, a first time, with too little or nothing in information and tools and facing some danger. The muffler shop liked the challenge of doing the one-off, first-time, innovative fabrication and welding! Such a teenager can get a good welcome and respect.

Many places that require nice language are far more toxic. Or perhaps any place with strict behavior and language rules is toxic, it often seems to be the case.

The parent said that women don't get it. I disagree, most of them working in such environments get it just like men. There are some exceptions for either gender.

Professionalism is to keep distance to others, banter is the opposite, as it is a form of bonding.

"Modern" workplaces that advertise themselves as such are very likely toxic. Might seem counter intuitive but it is often the case in reality.

Those are primary school rules. Seeing adults living like that is shocking.

Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.

And involuntary restrictions of basic freedoms like what and when to eat and where and when to sleep.

If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.

But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.

Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.

Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.

Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.

The thing is, we allow corporations to become (way) too fat. When a corporation grows too big, it grows uncontrollable as well - once the complexity of any corporation grows so large that there is no way for any single person to understand at least the basic scopes of everything the corporation's parts do at the same time, all kind of auditing and oversight becomes a sham, no matter if internal (boards) or external (consultancies, auditors, regulatory agencies).

With regards to camaraderie and banter, I don't even want to talk about world views. I genuinely don't think they matter too much in that context. Really what I'm sick of is just a lack of any attempt to make a connection whatsoever. I don't need to align with a person politically or socially to build a connection and have good workplace banter. There's just such a fundamental unwillingness to do so, in my experience. That's what bugs me.

And I know the difference. I've been in both blue collar and white collar environments. Blue collar people look to build the connection and bond together almost immediately, just about every time. There's a period of 'feeling each other out' when you start on a new job or with a new coworker so that they can suss out _how to connect with you_. That's right: it's such a first-class citizen to their working relationships that there's an entire art form to initiating it.

Contrasting with the white collar environment... it's almost non-existent, unless you work with people who, ironically, come from blue collar environments. I think it's really sad, and I think we could benefit from being a little looser. I don't think that means we need to drag any contentious topics in, nor do I think it means that we need to drag ourselves into un-professionalism. There's just something to be said for being able to be goofy and chat with coworkers that seems to be lost on the white collar environment.

Harmony is the strength and support of all institutions. Banter and camaraderie build that harmony.

This is the same in blue collar environments. They have more of the levity that I'm seeking regardless.

> And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.

Maybe this is it? I'm not fully convinced. I have worked with tech dorks that had a sense of humor, and that didn't bring contentious things to the working environment. Is it a lack of wit? I don't know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get, honestly.

But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...

My father was a mechanic. He learnt fast to stop trying to correct know-it-alls about cars. "Let 'em do stupid shit, it gives us work to bill".

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/big-techs-big-pro...

This is not harassment.

Sounds like a great way of excluding people from the workforce.

There’s nothing better for team cohesion than agreeing on the person you are going to bully

Some dickhead flinging racial slurs at me all day doesn't make me feel that they have my back. Quite the opposite, actually.

Perhaps I'm picturing the situation wrong, but why wouldn't it work on the precision levels of a tape measure?

Hearing old stories of what people did make it seem like some sort of thug culture. I wonder what share of workplace 'accidents' was due to betting.

Banter is a matter of wit. You could call it an intellectual pursuit.

Blue collar jobs are primarily not intellectual pursuits. They need their own kind of smarts, but these smarts are relatively orthogonal to the kind of linguistic smarts used in banter, and most importantly the work output itself is not intellectual. There's little chance of the banter directly getting into the work output, and so there's little direct motivation for bosses to police it.

Software development is basically entirely an intellectual pursuit that very much overlaps the wit of banter, and banter is likely to leak into the work output. Hence easter eggs are a thing. So, bosses are more likely to want to police banter-adjacent activities, which has a likely chilling effect on banter itself.

Another, more recent, factor is that more software development activity is online/remote and therefore lower bandwidth. The subtleties of banter don't convey as well as they would in-person.

I work in that industry and can say with confidence that statement is false.

I think the average demographic here is the standard software engineering team in the US, unfortunately. I hope I'm wrong. There are some high profile HN'ers that are women (e.g. DoreenMichele comes to mind).

Fun fact: in eastern Europe (and Russia too?) the gender dynamics of software engineering are much more gender equal compared to the US/EU. Probably other STEM disciplines as well. I'm not sure about welding though.

I'm getting a bit side tracked with my thoughts, it's just that I think it ties into bigger issues.

I remember once being in a feminism class, as the only male, making a case for getting women into stem and it fell on deaf ears. I think that's also in part because women (and men for that matter) that take feminism classes tend to skew liberal artsy. I just happen to have a liberal artsy side and a STEM side (and a cool feminism teacher that was patient enough for all my naive questions so I felt emotionally safe to take her class).

I wish there were more women in the conversation but unfortunately there aren't. The last company I worked for happened to have an equal 50/50 gender split. That was cool. It confirmed what I thought about men and women: ignore gender and focus on personality and their thoughts. I've often been in situations where any form of stereotypes have been thrown out of the window and my last employer was one of them. It's beautiful.

Unfortunately, HN seems to be too big for that. The culture needs to shift and I don't have much of a clue how. I think in part it's with how women versus men are socialized here. Boys that are socially excluded tend to go towards computers. Girls don't really seem to be socially excluded that often compared to boys? Just brainstorming, I might be totally off.

> Are there actually any women in this conversation? I find many of the comments at YC to be obnoxiously male dominant and condescending, this comment section included. It's been frustrating me for quite a while now.

I'm curious how you find them frustrating. When I was reading them, I wasn't quite sure what to think about it.

By the way, I've used a throwaway because of my submission to HN, not because of this comment. I thought I was on my pseudonym account. I have autism (diagnosed in my mid thirties) and I think many people here are on the spectrum, which is what my submission is about.

It's kind of gross, sure, if you're in that minority, but a part of me can appreciate that the conservatives are honest about what's in their hearts. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not.

To be honest here, she started the lecture. He offered advice she lectured him and "explained why his method wouldn’t work". There was no need for that lecture/explanation.

Had she been a man she'd be challenged in the same way with that response. The right non-provocative response would have been "I can't use the measuring tape since that's only precise to X ...".

He felt put down and he'd have done exactly same had she been a man.

If I can't stay calm and think rapidly under mild social pressure without threat of bodily harm or lost lives, I personally wouldn't feel honest in telling my teammates, "yes, if you or I are in a situation with risk to life or limb, you should trust that I'll handle it appropriately and protect myself and/or you."

The dynamic works when flirting is within a social circle because bad behavior risks your social status in the group and it works in bars because you're equals, around friends, and can just leave. At work, at least in an office, is kinda the worst combination. I've seen it work well outside of office settings because there aren't as complicated power dynamics— we're all equally in the shit in the kitchen.

Fun fact: the actor playing Cooter was elected a US Congressman.

Why do men think sexism is symmetrical? The reason sexual overtures from men are a problem is because they are usually serious and they are statistically threatening, because men often hurt women who don't respond to them in a way they deem appropriate. You would never fear this woman.

So a "loose" tip on a measuring tape is actually more accurate than a fixed rigid tip that does not move. (though I don't think I've ever seen a tape measure that is lacking this feature)

https://asktooltalk.com/questions/faq/tools/tape_measures/ta...

But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy).

I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?

Using verboten words as an example, I'm often willing to stop using words that others don't like. The harm to me is low (english is a big language, there's plenty of other words left), so if there's any harm at all to another it's reasonable for me to stop using the word. Assessment of harm will vary, as will harm to me from loss of words - which is why I stand my ground on some technical words.

My line is, n* - Not even going to type it pronouns - Whatever floats your boat master->main - Sure. Fine. I guess. Stop coming in my room and messing with my stuff. master/slave->controller/peripheral - Really? I'm going to say no for now, but work on brevity and check back later. MOSI/MISO->??? - NO.

Does drawing the line there make me a bigot? Where's the cutoff?

Ask your female friends if it's ever happened to them. I expect a large majority of them will be able to tell you a story.

Here's the best way I've been able to come up with, to get a feel for it. Suppose you have a nice watch. When somebody says, "Nice watch!", you say, "Thanks". But when you start meeting more than one person who won't stop talking about your watch, you get a little antsy. When somebody follows up with "Give me your fucking watch!" you start to think about leaving it at home some times.

Except that when you're a woman, you can never leave that at home.

This experience really isn't just about her. It's something practically all women experience. She seems to have just assumed her audience would share that context -- perhaps a side effect of being in academia.

On a full stick (20/24'), holding an 1/8, especially for hand layout and fabrication, is perfectly fine in most cases.

Is this really harassment? It sounds kinda humorous or complimentary. Author seems to have no sense of humour.

I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).

Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.

I expect variation in the women I meet, some will be scared of me and some have much bigger balls than I do. If I calibrate my banter such that 1% of women are scared, am I in the wrong?

Our assumptions about who will succeed in the most difficult situations don't seem to hold up.

This article is talking specifically about the ways in which it is detrimental to be a tradeswoman. So in this context, being a woman makes it more difficult for this person to their job.

Looking at another example of something that would make being a tradesperson difficult: Would you call it harassment if customers were consistently making flippant remarks about a co-worker that was missing a hand?

This is why safety critical welds are xray inspected, checked for cracks, etc. Not clear if her diploma included some certs, but those typically will include a bend test and/or xray.

Assholes exist everywhere, but “we” don’t have to apologize for them or make the workplace a safer space for them.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.bmxmuseum.com/user-images/2...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.bmxmuseum.com/user-images/2...

Steady hands and a good rhythm are helpful.

I won the top welding student award at my high school. The competition wasn't great. Mostly, I just didn't smoke a ton of pot right before class.

Indeed. Women are socialized to seek men of higher status as a partner. Thus men feel the need to seek higher status to become an attractive mate. And so men "infiltrate" any position that offers a chance at higher status (at least where high pay stands in as a proxy). Likewise, men are socialized to seek women with beauty rather than status, so there is little imperative for women to seek professions of status, but do benefit from careers that will preserve their beauty – so something like welding in a harsh environment that is hard on one's health is not a top choice.

That said, the social norms do seem to be changing. It appears the younger generations aren't coupling up so much anymore, and if that trend continues attracting a mate may no longer be a consideration.

It's not a struggle is a relief!

While one person saying this once is not necessarily harassment, the frame of reference has to be from the context of the recipient. Consider how often the author has to hear this or similar comments from customers as a result of being a woman working in a trade.

Two things can be true at the same time: that this type of banter has undesirable consequences as well as desirable ones. This type of nuance is generally the sort of thing that's worth trying to understand before you try to 'fix' it.

And more discussion around these issues is more likely to lead to positive outcomes than ignoring them.

Just telling the truth in a low key softball way where we can all laugh, and of course you're laughing right along with me.

I realize I made a throw away account just to post this, but try reflecting shop talk back to white men with white stereotypes

They often can't take the shit they give out. You won't know who's-who until you get undermined behind your back and they start fucking with your work

The insecure ones blend in with the ones who can actually take the shit they give and it's the collective support of giving shit to non-white men in the trades that's the problem

It's high school bullies trying to present as it being all in good fun when it rarely is

Actors get their famous catchphrases thrown at them consistently as well.

That's just the way it goes.

Is that not down to the culture? I found some of the warmest workplaces were also the places were everyone was constantly shitting on each other and not taking it too serious. I'd not say it was bullying, as everyone got a piece. There was a certain toughness to it, but at the same time everyone was caring deeply for one another.

> a tech bro website like hacker news

HN doesn't feel like that to me. Whenever I'm here, I have my brainstorm and science hat on. Nothing more, nothing less. To call HN a tech bro site, it seems to be a bit of an attack and not conductive towards the discussion. I guess the definition of tech bro differs. Also, being a male that doesn't care too much about its own gender, I am probably "well-suited" to not care.

In my case, I draw the line if they're also into sports (like going to a soccer match or something). Probably others don't. But that's why I have a bit of an issue with words like "tech bros". Like, do tech bros even lift? Most don't seem to. The characterization is too vague.

> Women do not get paid to be condescended towards

That makes sense, and I can imagine how it is experienced as such. It's sad to see.

I remember being on a subreddit once and experiencing it the other way (r/womenover30 or something). When I said something I was downvoted. If a woman said the same thing, she wasn't. I can imagine some women feel that a bit here. Perhaps a lot, but my imagination fails there. I get that it sucks.

> This community is obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.

What does it mean to be obnoxiously male? I've seen so many different ideas on what it means to be male that I honestly stopped giving a shit about what people mean. It's too confusing, despite me being a hetero cis white male.

I guess it's the autism. Whenever it comes to gender (masculinity and femininity) I mostly see rhetorical nonsense (e.g. some people saying that being emotional sensitive is a feminine quality. It is most likely true that more women are like that, but I just find that whole frame of thinking toxic as the word "femininity" almost implies it's inherent, which I think is highly debatable - I can go on like that for a while, also about masculinity). Could you be a bit more factual so I can make my own conclusions?

I mean, I've been to a feminism class and while that was really useful, I still think the typology is silly.

---

That it is seen as condenscending, that depends. With regards to condescending on women in this thread, I see that. I've also seen it to some extent in other threads. But condescending in general? No. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but you write a little hand wavy at times. I mean, the points you make still stand, but I think they'd stand better without the labeling things so strongly that are clearly a strong interpretation that I don't understand how you get to it.

I do get the general vibe of the average Hacker News person when the subject is about dating. Comments tend to steer towards hopelessness, and that particular way of being I found is strongly correlated with being out of touch with how women look at certain things. I get the sense when women write something the average HN commenter has an issue to not look past their own trauma in order to listen to what women are saying. In that sense, I can see it's off putting.

- Construction workers hooting and whistling at women

- Gamers online being horrible to _everyone_

- Managers (as noted) sexually harassing employees

All cases were consequences for behaving badly are far less likely.

Sometimes I wonder.

The left spends a lot of time pointing out that the right is bigoted, and the right just shrugs, because so what? These two groups disagree on whether there is a problem.

People who are not women have to deal with such things as well, as a sibling commenter pointed out. Short guys, fat guys, skinny guys, they would all get picked on (in a friendly way or otherwise). The difference is that society will not tolerate them whining about it. Women won't care and men will laugh at them. So they suck it up.

It's frustrating when people say "just talk to a woman", as if all women have the same perspective on this, or women are the only ones who experience it. It's itself a sexist thing to say. I know women who don't have this kind of victim mentality and they're happier for it.

> posh ... highbrow

It's using a stereotype as argument - perhaps not coincidentally - rather than listening to what people actually say.

I find the same (also in the UK) from having lived in (and grown with) a non-western culture. One that is also uptight (much more so in many ways, and definitely sexist) but in a different way.

> Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable

I am quite surprised at the extent to which gender stereotypes are pervasive. At a bonfire last weekend kids were being sold illuminated toys, and all the little boys had swords, and the girls had unicorns. My daughters would have wanted swords (they are teen and adult) but I have realised that is unusual.

I think the current tendency to prevent all possibility to upsetting behaviour is overshooting the mark.

Against bullying is a good movement.

Against all possibly upsetting remarks is basically being against banter and killing a part of what makes us human. I hope that free speech remains allowed and to some extend "uncancelable".

I think you are the only one who said that?

As a man who has been the primary parent for most of my children's lives (my ex is not very good with older children) I find the assumptions people make annoying. People are surprised my younger daughter lives with me rather than her mother. They struggle to find words to describe a man as primary carer.

I think this is damaging to men - bringing up children is incredibly rewarding and men are given a smaller role in it. Its damaging to women too.

In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).

When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).

Yeah, harassment is is part of life. Just accept it, right!?

WTF? How low should our standards as a society be!?

The data shows roughly 454k workers in the welders, solderers, and brazers occupation series. With their claim of 3.5 severe injuries per 100 worker-careers, that's about 16k severe injuries. If you assume an average career is about 25 years, that's about 636 severe injuries per year, compared to the 48 fatalities per year. So it's an order of magnitude higher (which I think is the direction most people would expect).

> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target.

Can be exhausting. You have to either join in, be a target, or both.

My own experience in tall ships and shipyards, where there are plenty of life and death decisions is not that.

There are people that I can fluster easily in a social situation that are perfectly calm and capable in high pressure dangerous situations. There are people that are practically insult comedians that I wouldn’t want driving a car in the same parking lot.

If she struggles when they ask her to do a 6mm and 8mm weld, guess what, then she shouldn’t get the job. If she does it properly, maybe she should. Complaining about being tired and having to squat to lift things? It’s the job. And having someone tell you your hands are dirty is now harassment? Maybe customer didn’t want a super dirty invoice. Guess what librarians deal with homeless creepers all the time. Welders are not uniquely harassed.

People really ought to have a poll on whether this whole woke equal nature of things matters. In WW2, we had plenty of Rosie the Riveter working. Now less so. Times change, jobs change.

I just want my welds not to break.

> Re: tech bro

The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of "founders". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking.

The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro "thing". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY

> Re: obnoxiously male

This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comment sections on HN, but let's just talk about this comment section.

Commenters here are confidently asserting that the author's lived experience is wrong because of a certain interpretation of the words that they typed in the article. When she says that someone made comments that made her feel othered, the reaction here is to disbelieve and downplay. That is very much a "obnoxiously male" way of approaching things. In more balanced spaces, the presumption would be that this blog post was made for a reason and that the person who made it is valid and rational by default. Nobody here has any additional information, and they are asserting that their interpretation of her words is correct even though they are heavily influenced by their own biases of gender, class, and otherwise.

We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.

It is hard to be funny without referring to anything about the current situation.

People who work dangerous jobs can get pretty callous about it. I saw people doing dangerous shit constantly. And the people with permanent injuries end up using gallows humor to cope.

Isn’t that kind of the point though? That the racist and the sexist and the queerbasher think they have power over the group they’re bigoted against - and that’s what lends them the confidence to act mean?

I can think of a few instances where I would have looked past women in trade shops and have made a concerted effort not to, but it was because the value in skilled trades work is more than the transaction. there's a significant and physical trust component involved and also an implied relationship with aspects of reciprocity that come with the work. part of that is assessing whether the person you are dealing with can signal the values to facilitate that trust. tropes about sexism don't capture that nuance.

we can talk about sexism from men all day, but for men who are contenders for finding wives and having kids, when young working class women have "a man whose boss is another woman" in the top of their selection criteria, you will see guys lining up to welcome women into trades. until then, the stated reasons for why women don't feel welcome in them will seem inconsistent, evasive, and won't bear much scrutiny.

what the criticisms and entire worldview of the prof seem to lack is an understanding of human desire. great that she learned a useful skill. not great that she's coopting it to drive a narrative from her institutional background at the expense of men for whom this is their actual livelihood.

The line is mighty fine between bullying and good natured ribbing, and has a lot to do with group dynamics. Edgy banter can bring a group together, but bullying can do far more damage.

Wouldn’t it be in your best interest to be kind and supportive to one another in such a dangerous / difficult environment? That way everyone is happy and confident and focuses on the stresses of the job, not the stress of being bullied or being cajoled into bullying for the sake of conformity?

What you’re describing sounds like it really only appeals to a certain kind of person, and I don’t understand how that kind of person makes a better welder.

It's a constant stream of "but my guys don't do this" "but my guys do do this".

It's all just rephrasing of, well, this is the highbrow culture, and this is the working class culture, and I'm in one or the other and you're abnormal.

The reality is that it's just two different worlds and where they clash things get weird.

Looking at _so many_ responses to my post, almost none of which actually have new content, makes me think this is some sort of dead internet bots vs. bots contest.

This counts as an inflammatory statement. Even thinking this is beneath a person of fairness. Those are people too. And you may not like the era they were in and you may want to redefine the era of today to some lala make-believe, but at no point should you disrespect and denigrate the people who don't buy in to your redefinition.

It is like saying: Windows developers are stupid and stuck in the past because they cannot get in line with programming on a mac. come on! they don't have to. And they don't want to.

I agree some of this is class warfare not gender warfare.

Liked the article. Odd to say that of a sad observation of life's iniquities, but it's a good article I think.

I never made a claim that "all men do X" or that "shop talk and banter are fairly universal". I did point out that I and my friends do not mock our friends and colleagues.

Still avoiding positive claims, but here are some normative claims:

  - I object to claiming that mocking is normal and acceptable in all groups of men
  - some, not all, working class subcultures use mocking as a shibboleth
  - this aspect of those subcultures is not a thing I think "we" should valorize

Especially seen that people pushing for this to be considered harassment are the exact same demographic closing their eyes when it's pointed to them that number of actual rapes are going through the roof in Europe.

White men joking about a woman looking good: harassment. White women getting raped: eyes closed, don't want to hear about it.

And of course the overlap between polite people complimenting women that they're good looking and actual rapists is approximately zero.

Priorities, priorities.

There was a truth to the business about scolds and snowflakes. It's all right to have a bit of fun. No need to lose one's mind over it.

I don't know why there's a need to define either of these as inferior and wrong - isn't the point of diversity to allow people from different backgrounds to take different approaches?

To me, personally, the "kind, supportive" style often comes off as insincere. It's actually a barrier to me trusting someone. But I don't know, maybe that's just me.

If you're cutting with a bandsaw - the blade is a lot thinner than that.

And if cutting with a circular saw, the cutting teeth are wider than the main disk of the saw, which complicates matters - and I can't imagine it'd be easy to keep the tape measure hooked on either.

And of course - subtract 1/8 inch? Are you sure you don't mean add 1/8 inch? If you're learning a clever new technique, better to practice on some scrap, not do it on a customer's material while they're watching :)

At the higher level, saws have no undo function. Cut an expensive bit of metal too short? Someone has to pay $$$ for new material. Buddy on another machine did a load of work on the part before you cut it too short? He's going to have to redo it all. Who'll pay for his time? The stock you cut too short was on a long lead-time or urgent project? You just fucked up the schedule.

So if a machinist is doing some work for you and they want to measure twice and cut once - they're doing you a favour :)

Even so, categorical prohibitions of mockery (in society, in particular workplaces, whatever) are truly and obviously joyless propositions. Maybe they're warranted in some contexts! But to say 'there can be no mockery' is indeed inherently stifling.

That kind of thing rarely comes up in corporate america. In corp/academia people just like to imply you're lazy or unintelligent, subtly and frequently. But yeah, white collar jobs are annoying as well. That's why we all get paid to do them.

Did I cry like a baby, no. I made jokes about their looks and mannerisms. It's called banter.

There is a line that should not be crossed, but someone making one off comments on the out of the ordinary shouldn't be classed as harassment.

It's not the work or the culture, it's the people. The type that would call you a vagina for wanting water on a hot day to avoid dehydration. Or the boss that will tell you "you think too much" when you come to them with an idea that increases productivity. But ya, the work or culture would be a piece of cake to navigate. For me, often time it's the idiots you have to work with that usually make a place a shit place to work.

This probably seems obviously true to you but it should not. Some people think there's a reasonable amount of banter, sometimes at the expense of another acquaintance, before it becomes bullying or unacceptable in the workplace.

Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?

I participate for a few reasons:

1.) I'm a 3rd generation techie and that's a fairly rare perspective, particularly for people of my age group (I'm 36). HN is one of the few places online that can appreciate that nuance and why it might matter. Related to this, I'm a woman who can in no way be considered an interloper or someone who doesn't understand the culture or the professions. I'm basically here to offer the perspective that the average HN user might hear from his daughter in 10-30 years when I opine on gender stuff.

2.) It's one of the few places with a decent age spread amongst users. Too many other sites are dominated by people under the age of 30 (to be generous).

3.) It's text based and amenable to long format textual discussions, which are how I prefer to interact online since I joined the WWW in 1993 and grew up with the text based Web.

4.) It's somewhere online where a good chunk of the userbase is more technologically proficient than I am and I like talking to people who know more than me about esoteric subjects.

The attributes and reasons do not matter in isolation. They will find where to poke even if you’re a twin of one of the group members. Red hair is just the obvious one to use.

The alternative is going to the office, filtering thoughts in your mouth and reporting slight misspeaks and inappropriately timed eye contacts to a special manager who then decides who’s higher in hierarchy according to some rules.

It makes me think it's a somewhat innate way to foster relationships. It definitely seems to break down walls. I've come to learn that the more a group roasts you the more they like you.

What actually seems to be the common factor is male groups in informal settings

My strongest lifelong work friends definitely came from grad school where none of that happened. Or from research work where it didn't either. But there it was pressure and performance and cooperation that helped. It breeds trust.

In blue collar work, esp team oriented which it often is, I'm not sure it's the shop talk or the team/trust environment. Either way i felt the same bond to people making pizza 5 busy nights in a row as I did late night coding sprints while pair programming, or contorting under the steel hull of a target boat to reach a bad CPU while my colleague watched the terminal while seasick and we are both drinking diesel funes.

It's about shared trust I think. The level of casualness of shop talk is just an indicator and kind of a stress test of bonds.

It's something to do with the casualness or gruffness of it that makes it better. Office environments are so sterile. Maybe it's the lack of HR. lol

Which is a good thing really, because I wouldn't want to think that people were actually determining fitness to be trusted with a soldering iron or embedded systems design based on their witty comebacks or tolerance for jokes about their wife.

At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.

[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.

IDK, I think it's to enforce pecking orders based on stuff you can't at all help. I grew up working class and hated it--it's essentially bullying, no matter how you look at it.

It's one thing to make lighthearted jokes about some stuff you did, like "remember the time you forgot to base64 decode the images and stored garbage in the DB". It's entirely another to bully people for who and what they are. You're basically daring people to get somehow violent with you to get you to stop, and besides that being dangerous, a lot of people would rather not. It also creates this dynamic where people willing to be violent avoid bullying and rise ok the pecking order, and those who aren't don't.

> When a corporation grows too big, it grows uncontrollable as well

True, which is why corporations eventually fail.

BTW, governments also grow too big and become uncontrollable.

For me personally, despite being in tech in a well paying job, at my church and at various volunteer groups I'm part of, I am exposed to people of all backgrounds. And of course, growing up middle class and seeing how my friends and family behaved, I feel way more comfortable among what I consider 'normal' people. It's like two different worlds at work versus in person. Luckily, I'm now at a chipmaker where people seem more level-headed. Something about having to interact with physical constraints makes people more moderate I think. The SW startup world is so far off the rails, I found it difficult to relate.

That legs turn to jelly thing is internal. Some people are just less confident than others. Some can fake or really feel confidence even when they're inexperienced while some are the opposite. How can a professor not understand this when they surely all go through similar situations teaching a new class where the students are judging them on their competence?

If the customer was trying to guess which of two people in front of them might be a welder, and only 5% of welders are female, it's not irrational to assume that it's the man. The customer may never have seen a female welder before. Until they say something like you can't be a welder, you're a woman, I think the generous reading would be that the customer is having their priors updated in real time, not necessarily that they're a misogynist.

She is in good company. Everyone thinks most other people are incompetent. Find the best welder you can, film them doing their thing, post it on the Internet. Watch the comments flood in with scathing criticism for how they're doing it wrong.

It's like a sport now.

Occasionally. Many times it is worth considerably less. Time is valuable.

You might argue that "punching up" is acceptable, or even that it's not slurring by definition (which I'd dispute), but membership of one "privileged class" doesn't automatically translate to actual privilege. (I think the feminists call this intersectionality.) In such a context, the labels of "privileged classes" absolutely can be used to punch down (e.g. saying "you're such a man" and slamming the door in the face of an impoverished gay transgender man trying to access domestic abuse services).

Personally, there are many jobs that people just don't understand because they just don't interact with them. Welding is one example, but there are many.

My Uncle died with a well deserved lifestyle after doing "large pipe" welding. The definition of large, in this case, was pipe you could theoretically drive a car through. Just to weld the pipe together from plate steel, one would have to weld together a rig to hold the plate, as well as a roller press to bend the plate correctly.

People would be astounded that I, a software developer, would hold a welder in such high esteem, but while I might be (my own, probably faulty estimate) in the top 10,000 he was in the top 100 (again my own, probably faulty estimate). I've seen him walk into a job that took three "lesser" welder (mind you, these are family members, so please don't call them out as such) six hours and complete it in 20 minutes.

I'm what one might call a 10x programmer. That said, he was at least a 100x welder. Alas, he died due to a lung full of chromium, which is a real risk when welding the exotic metals that generally the top welders are asked to work.

I miss him dearly, and Lon (Lonnie) if you can read this from heaven, you're still the best damned welder I've ever seen, and a true master of your craft. You inspire me to do better than I do. I only hope to become as good in my field as you are in yours.