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.

Yeah, folks who don't grow up in rural towns or grow up lower-class REALLY don't get this.

They get the exact same treatment that you'd get if you were the 14-year-old kid working in the shop with his uncle. You get called names, teased, and tested—it's part of the culture.

But instead of recognizing it for what it is, they try to apply labels like "sexism" to it. Or they're "resentful for being tested" as if any shop jockey feels _confident_ the first time they fix an item for a customer.

If you don't like the culture, leave it. Stop applying your labels when you don't even understand the world you stepped into. It's like labeling the Native Americans as "savages" just because they don't fit your sensibilities of how the world "ought" to work.