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

It was interesting for me going from interacting with wealthy, educated developers, to working in a very physical, low-paying blue-collar job. It seemed like living in two different worlds almost.

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

I'm curious to what you mean by this

I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

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.

> find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence

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

Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.

I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.

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.

> 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

Couldn't agree more!

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

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.

Where do you derive your happiness now?

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.

It's hard to put into words. I think the essence of you questions is "what is your philosophy now, and how does it differ from before?" That's a question I've been struggling to conceptualize myself for a while now, so I can't describe it with any sense of coherence in a public forum.

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

>I'm curious to what you mean by this

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.

Middle class is always more insecure. A middle-class individual could move either up or down, this causes anxiety.

I think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.

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

> find middle class folk ... to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

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 )

Well it's not UK specicfic but as there's only really workers and owners, they could be insecure about being a slightly better paid worker?

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

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)

> universal conscription

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

Look at it more like part of the education system.

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.

I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011. Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.

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.

Also, an owner - of a very limited amount. Junior partner, at best.

"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".

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.

Yes, but most 1st world nations have all-volunteer armies, not conscription.

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

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

AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.

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.

All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.

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.

Did you take two years of your life to go into the military in your early 20s?

Wasn’t that Mao’s idea of forcing city kids to the countryside to make them better party members?

Four years.

Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?

I kind of get this for men, what you're saying makes sense and is for sure the healthier option if all was equal. The sticking point is the social and power asymmetry. Being commented on in that manner is low-key kind of threatening. The name of the game is appease the guy long enough for your friends to get you out of there. And when you're at work it's hard to just leave. Guys with nothing to lose don't take soft-nos for an answer and hard-nos are how you get assaulted, from experience that one.

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.

There are many taxonomies of people. Workers vs owners is one, and relates to the relationship between people and the means of production. Other taxonomies are young vs old, male vs female, and class structures with more than two classes. Notice that this thread has been about social class, more than economic class.

> I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

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.

There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US

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.

One point that Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System makes over and over (maybe never quite explicitly, but implicitly, throughout) is that Fussell’s “middle class” is essentially defined by being thoroughly pathetic. They’re the most class-concerned, by far, desperately anxious to signal higher class, while having no clue how to correctly do that. An Upper-Middle spots them a mile away, to say nothing of Upper. To Proles, their preferences and behavior are grating or risible. They end up jockeying awkwardly for position only amongst themselves.

> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.

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?

That's one way of looking at it. But there are other ways of slicing and dicing an populace and it's capital.

I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.

Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.