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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 | 3 comments | 06 Nov 24 00:24 UTC | HN request time: 1.322s | source
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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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dowager_dan99 ◴[06 Nov 24 16:31 UTC] No.42064775[source]▶
I'm now a soft-hands, academic-type but worked in a metal fabrication shop all through my schooling. Your read is very accurate. I still get her perspective though, because even as a male, white, straight, married guy in a shop full of the same I found it exhausting.
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1. 0xbadcafebee ◴[06 Nov 24 21:29 UTC] No.42069713[source]▶
Another anecdote: my straight white male friend who isn't a tough guy left a job (building commercial ACs) as an electrician because the whole business was full of dudes bullying whoever they could. Plus the management just didn't care about worker safety, and the workers took it as a point of pride that they were ruining their own health. Toxic as hell. He found a different job with less machismo bullshit and more safety and is much happier. But that job is also overnight shift; if he was a single parent that'd be nearly impossible, luckily his wife can stay at home with the kids. This is in rural Virginia, not a ton of jobs around.
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2. vundercind ◴[06 Nov 24 21:45 UTC] No.42069961[source]▶
My window into the blue collar world has made it look like if you want a job where safety is respected, you probably want a union job. There a macho tendency working against it, and management’s all too happy to let that, plus the implied threat of firing if you become too irritating, erode safe practices, even if they nominally have policies to the contrary.
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3. AngryData ◴[07 Nov 24 00:09 UTC] No.42071615[source]▶
Yeah union jobs definitely seem to get all the safety aspect down in my experiences in the US. In some cases in can be a little overzealous, but 99.99% of the time you want to be doing what they recommend and have the tools and safety gear they expect so you don't get maimed or killed just to save somebody else 30 cents. That isn't to say you can't find safe non-union work, but generally you gotta do a bit of job hopping around in most trades to find a safe employer because doing unsafe shit is all too uncommon in trades.