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 think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.

It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.

Wasn’t that Mao’s idea of forcing city kids to the countryside to make them better party members?