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

What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one - basically it's a posh person finding out what the "real world" looks like.

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.

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.

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.

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.