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

Without wanting to indulge too much in macho tropes: A welding shop is inherently dangerous. If you spend long enough in one, you are going to get seriously injured at some point. You are going to be the first responder when someone else gets seriously injured. Surviving in that environment requires a certain level of toughness. I'm not defending bullying, but some places aren't supposed to be welcoming.

I just looked it up. Welding is definitely not a safe profession, but it seems like severe injury rates is around 3.5 per hundred workers throughout a whole career. Definitely not "most". And about the same or slightly less than carpentry (4 per hundred), which from personal experience is a profession filled with decent and friendly people.

There is no way that is correct. What data are you using? [https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables/fatal-occupati...]

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

It's not so much accidents as the lifetime occupational exposure. Metal fumes are nasty.

You are conflating serious injury with fatalities.

That sheet is fatalities. It’s literally in the URL and at the top of the page. See column ‘Total fatal injuries’.

There's a lot of potential for petty injuries that'll be a nuisance for weeks to months. Minor burns, slightly smashed fingers or hands, some real good cuts, etc. Not a lot of potential for serious injury though above the baseline of your environment (i.e. air conditioned shop vs muddy trench)

Eh, the way to actually be safe—not just feel safe—is not to be macho and tough but to be uncompromisingly professional.

Right. But the post you are refuting is talking about "serious injuries" not "fatalities".

they were claiming numbers an order of magnitude less than fatalities.

Per hundred workers. Your link is in absolute units of fatalities, their claim is a rate. At the very least, you need the number of workers (which is also available in BLS data) to refute their claim.

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).

thanks for tracking that down! I stand corrected.

What on earth? Yeah, if I work in a dangerous profession, I want my coworkers to be people I trust, not people who bully me because I stand out. Honestly, if it's a dangerous workplace, shouldn't we be looking out for each other instead of making casually sexist comments at the only woman in the shop?

I worked construction for a few years after high school and the only injuries I received on the job was from bullying/hazing (minor, but still). Never mind the stupid shit they did that could have hurt someone, but luckily didn't.

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.

Why would the risk of either being injured or treating injury require you to be the target of bullying or a bully?

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.

The main factor driving safety is experience. I suspect shop talk does indeed correlate, but I think it's a mistake to assume causation. Put differently, the number of angry words thrown around being a major contributing factor to an accident response strains belief. It's experience.

On some level, you're describing a difference between traditional male bonding (joking and "razzing") and traditional female bonding (being kind and supportive). Both of these can be positive and both can be toxic - bullying is an obvious case, but just ask anyone who has been in a supposedly "supportive" environment filled with backstabbing and gossip how nice that is.

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.

I did a couple of years at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego as a welder after the first .com crash.

The (literal) toxic work environment is why I left welding, even though I genuinely enjoyed the work. But I was already starting to see real changes in my health, even though I was super careful about respirator use, etc. What really sealed the deal was learning that my shift lead, who I thought was a good decade older than me, was actually a few years younger, but had just been welding longer, with the body damage to show for it.

Yea, that’s one thing that really stood out to me when I did a 2 year mechanical engineering program - mostly training to be a cad jockey. Some of my teachers looked waaay older than they should have, and the welding instructor was the worst.

Now think of how many guys there are out there doing it with no repository protection and the good ‘ole safety squints.

Sounds like a kitchen.