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

The photos of the welds made me think she needs to goto welding school.

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

Yeah, those TIG welds are something else, verging on trolling

I went looking for it and got distracted by the faux wood grain paint on the aluminium frame.

It is annoying to be generally in support of diversity but then you get a case comes where someone is claiming discrimination and it turns out they just suck at their job. This sort of thing is just ammunition for the "dumb, barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" crowd.

I know barely anything about welding, could you explain what a good weld would look like?

weld prettiness != weld goodness. I am not saying she is god's gift to welding, but without actual testing, a cross section, and xray, you cannot judge accurately.

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.

Some examples of a good weld:

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.

Not every weld has to be pretty. The ugly aluminum welds look plenty strong and are not normally visible. Welds like that can take 1/10th the time of pretty welds.

I admit it, I enjoy the FB videos for comments like this. It is hilarious. It never matters a bit whether the target is a good welder or not, guarantee a raft of people will swing by and tell them they suck.

They're not the worst welds I've ever seen but they're very good either. I would be embarrassed if those were my welds and I wouldn't take a welder with such welds seriously regardless of their gender. The quality is on the level of pretty low end job-shop. I wouldn't care about the bed slats but it would be hard for me to ignore the bad welds on anything regularly visible.

Making welds look good is more than just appearance, the appearance tells a story about how the weld was developed, how the temperature was controlled, how deep the penetration, porosity etc. It's easier to do this than do a post weld validation of weld integrity. TIG welding requires a lot of skill and is not like using a glue gun.

Laser welding on the other hand is much easier. Instead of making the large investment in time to learn how to TIG weld property she could just skip it and go direct to laser.