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

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254 points Michelangelo11 | 14 comments | 06 Nov 24 00:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.445s | source | bottom
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naming_the_user ◴[06 Nov 24 01:47 UTC] No.42056718[source]▶
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.

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esperent ◴[06 Nov 24 04:11 UTC] No.42057157[source]▶
> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.

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.

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1. Rinzler89 ◴[06 Nov 24 05:55 UTC] No.42057444[source]▶
>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.

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.

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2. fzeroracer ◴[06 Nov 24 07:21 UTC] No.42057800[source]▶
What does any of this have to do with what they said? There's a difference between an in-group privately calling each other whatever and said in-group directing it towards someone not part of said group.
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3. ◴[06 Nov 24 07:50 UTC] No.42057928[source]▶
4. Angostura ◴[06 Nov 24 14:57 UTC] No.42063285[source]▶
> How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.

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

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5. ◴[06 Nov 24 15:02 UTC] No.42063370[source]▶
6. linuxftw ◴[06 Nov 24 15:12 UTC] No.42063522[source]▶
Sounds like an opportunity for any of the wealthy left-leaning people to start a competitor and seize market share by hiring those traditional companies consider undesirable.
7. EliRivers ◴[06 Nov 24 15:20 UTC] No.42063668[source]▶
"how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs"

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

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8. joemazerino ◴[06 Nov 24 15:47 UTC] No.42064084[source]▶
Have you ever attended a mandatory DEI meeting? The entire premise of that industry is to tell you which slurs are acceptable (ie: cisgender ) and which are not.
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9. DFHippie ◴[06 Nov 24 16:59 UTC] No.42065277{3}[source]▶
"Cisgender" is a slur the same way "male", "heterosexual", and "white" are (I am all three; four, including cisgender). In other words, it is not a slur.
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10. ◴[06 Nov 24 17:58 UTC] No.42066372[source]▶
11. wizzwizz4 ◴[06 Nov 24 20:44 UTC] No.42069068{4}[source]▶
Slur isn't an intrinsic property of a word: it's a property of how it's used. "Male" can be a slur, as can "heterosexual", or "management". In theory, "cisgender" can also be a slur, though I've never heard such a use. (You'll sometimes hear "cissy", but I've never heard that used against a specific person.)

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).

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12. Rinzler89 ◴[06 Nov 24 21:53 UTC] No.42070067[source]▶
Great at excluding snowflakes which is what you want in those dangerous professions. If you get pissy that someone called you ginger, you're clearly not cut for any demanding and dangerous job. Better stay in your sanitized white collar safe space while you tweet how the world is mean.
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13. DFHippie ◴[06 Nov 24 23:34 UTC] No.42071259{5}[source]▶
The usage of the word "slur" in question -- it has to be this if it's on a list one can learn from DEI consultants -- is

    a derogatory or insulting term applied to a particular group of people.
It is inherent in the term itself, not in its use.* So it isn't simply anything that can be understood as an insult. All the stuff about "punching up" and so forth is beside the point.

"cisgender" has a technical meaning which is still it's primary use: someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (so it can apply to intersex people as well). In this it is like "heterosexual" and "male". Arguably it is not like "white", in that who counts as white is malleable, but for the most part whatever it is, in most contexts, "white" is not a slur either.

* I am in fact a lapsed linguist. I have a PhD. My specialization was in semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is meaning encoded in language. Pragmatics is meaning inferred from use: "it's cold in here" meaning "shut the window", for example. I am aware that one can talk more precisely and at much, much greater length about all of this. But this is Hacker News, so this is all I am going to say.

14. Angostura ◴[07 Nov 24 00:40 UTC] No.42071883{3}[source]▶
Check out professions by suicide rates https://www.registerednursing.org/articles/suicide-rates-pro...

Apparently a lot of construction, extraction installation, maintenance and repair folk have a very bad time of i. Perhaps if they could get decent support in the work place that wouldn't happen. Though I suppose you'd probably conclude it's just natural attrition as the snowflakes kill themselves.