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.

I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that's the only factor in everything the article described, and it's not specific to blue collar work.

There's a lot of actual prejudices (not just banter) among, say, "educated" tech industry workers, too.

Including sexism, racism, ageism, and classism.

Most people will at least superficially hide it in modern workplaces, but it's still there, and having effects.

You've probably seen evidence of this places you've worked, and you can also see it often in pseudonymous HN comments.

It's even worse. The educated tech industry workers don't actually make any banter, so any time their prejudices slip through, it's just their actual opinions instead of banter. It's a very bizarre opposite to the supposedly 'uneducated' blue collar way of doing things, which brings levity as a first-class citizen, and communicates boundaries well.

You don't even need to be inappropriate to have workplace banter. Nobody ever said that a light environment has to be built on jokes that bust chops. In fact, busting chops kind of blows. There's plenty of room for clowning around outside of that, and plenty of ways to build camaraderie, too. You don't have to bring racism or sexism to the table to have a good time, and you don't have to have a good time at someone else's expense.

Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer. We should be making more skeleton jokes and showing each other macaroni art pictures.

The tech industry is completely silod from normal society. Women barely exist.

And let's face it the kind of people who want to dedicate their life to staring at a screen make for a strange crowd.

Tech isn't siloed for no reason.

In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).

When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).