> “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.” Such harassment remains common for tradeswomen<p>If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.<p>Unless there was more to it the correct answer is along the lines of "yes thankfully" and then a laugh.<p>I'd recommend a good look in the mirror when looking for the problem in such situations.<p>Same goes for the thing about trying to discreetly notifying that someone has dirty hands:<p>Yes, I don't know what is up with Americans and demanding everyone has clean hands at all times, but as long as that is a thing this probably is meant as a favor. Maybe clumsily, but still.<p>More generally the saying: "when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras" comes to mind:<p>If you expect things to be meant funny or helpful (and give people some slack) maybe life becomes a lot less stressful than if everything has to be seen through a lens of gender dynamics.<p>And if one is known as a reasonable person, I guess people will also take your side if you have to be loud and clear about something, e.g. if it turns out someone wasn't just clumsily trying to be nice or funny.
I just bought a gas lens set for my welder and it included cups called the BBW and the FUPA. When I was taking MIG classes, they had a jar of anti-spatter gel called cooter snot tip dip. Can’t imagine why women are so rare in the profession…<p>I’ve been a tourist in a number of different trades, and welding beats them all for hostility and resistance to safety practices. You get called a pussy for wearing a mask, but of course the manganese fumes from welding steel will give you brain damage. I’ve been advised to run cutoff wheels far above their rated RPM, which risks explosion. It’s sad because welding might as well some combination of knitting and calligraphy but with metal. It’s great.
> I’m resentful of these silent evaluations, particularly when I’m learning something new and trying to keep all my fingers.<p>I don't think this is unique to Women at all. There's a tendency in these authors to perceive Men's interactions in the workplace as "easy" or "natural" or even desired for some reason. They typically aren't.<p>> Stoicism is a workaround to credibility.<p>It also comes with a high price. Those who pay it typically do not last. Ironically they often refuse to recognize the source of their suffering. If the job is hard, modify the tools to make it easier, your class of use just hasn't been typically considered but it wouldn't be impossible to create.<p>> The pontificating metal-shop customer should be, too.<p>It's everywhere. The number of times my credibility has been assumed based upon my appearance is huge. Customers often have to choose between two Men if a Women isn't working, and the same tropes apply there as well.<p>It all seems like the right idea for the wrong reasons and so the interpretation is heavily compromised by it.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
What these stories always miss is a control. Yea, people are judging her as being incompetent but they'll do that to anyone who seems incompetent. Maybe being a woman was part of it, or maybe having the subtle mannerisms and body language of a writing professor was part of it. They can't verbalize the "looks out of place" bit so they'll just latch onto the "looks like a woman" instead. I've worked with tradesmen and despite being a man, received similar treatment. I just didn't look competent. For example, I was about to move a truck to somewhere else on site and somebody offered to do it for me because it was hard to drive. In another case, somebody was surprised that I could weld. Another guy who understood put it as "you aren't as green as you are cabbage-looking".<p>That legs turn to jelly thing is internal. Some people are just less confident than others. Some can fake or really feel confidence even when they're inexperienced while some are the opposite. How can a professor not understand this when they surely all go through similar situations teaching a new class where the students are judging them on their competence?
I once met a welder who was told upon entering the field, “You’re going to meet a lot of serial killers in this line of work.” He thought his boss was just messing with him, but it turned out to be prophetic. He met something like 5 convicted serial killers in 20 years as a welder. Welding is solitary work that is itinerant. Some of the stories that guy told me would turn your stomach. Anyway— totally off topic, but I thought it was interesting.
> Like other tradeswomen, I’ve learned to work around unwanted comments, including uninvited conversations with men bent on signaling their expertise.<p>It's obvious why an uninvited conversations are perceived as a sexism.<p>But anyone with the experience in almost anything but particularly in any trade would tell you what men do receive uninvited conversations with men bent on signaling their expertise all the goddamn time.<p>Sure, seeing 'a woman out of place' triggers some of them to do it when they wouldn't do it with a man in the same place, because they <i>could</i> get told to shove their oh-so-important opinion to the place where sun is not shining, but the source of this behaviour is not to be a <i>sexist</i> asshole but just being an asshole.<p>As the other comment rightfully notes, any difference is going to be a target.
If anyone is looking to get in on the ground floor of a welding career, the Navy and their contractors have stood up buildsubmarines.com.<p>Apparently it's a large effort to recruit 100,000(!!) trades people, of all sorts, for a very large effort to build a lot of submarines.<p>And one thing they certainly need is welders. And they're training.<p>The opening video even has a female welder in it.<p>It's more of a grand assembly endeavor than a grand engineering endeavor (like the Apollo program was), but I know my time in the defense industry (supporting naval weapon systems: Standard Missile, Phalanx, RAM, etc.) was an interesting time. I've built enough software systems from seed that grew, flourished, and died with a simple `rm` command to know it can be interesting to point at a big metal hole in the water and say "I helped build that".
> The man in the audience at the academic conference who wants to lecture rather than ask a question...<p>To be honest here, she started the lecture. He offered advice she lectured him and "explained why his method wouldn’t work". There was no need for that lecture/explanation.<p>Had she been a man she'd be challenged in the same way with that response. The right non-provocative response would have been "I can't use the measuring tape since that's only precise to X ...".<p>He felt put down and he'd have done exactly same had she been a man.
> I laid down the welds and put my hood up and the guy goes, ‘Well, goddamn, bitch can weld,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, thank god.’”<p>The article refers to various forms of sexism and harassment, including the passage above. I’m absolutely not denying that these things happen in the workplace. That would be insane.<p>But it is also true that the exact exchange above could completely have happened between two guys. Anyone who knows tradesmen understands that there’s a fair amount of good natured hassling of coworkers that has nothing to do with sexism.<p>A lot of this work is dangerous and has to happen quickly and on schedule. You’re not really given serious responsibilities until you can demonstrate you’re not going to get someone crushed under a heavy weight or burned.<p>It might be that she is misinterpreting some of this, but I must concede that she’s kind of a badass because she completed all three years of training and actually does work as a welder.
All that I can add of value is summed up in the phrase "Sweet hood, you go girl!"<p>Personally, there are many jobs that people just don't understand because they just don't interact with them. Welding is one example, but there are many.<p>My Uncle died with a well deserved lifestyle after doing "large pipe" welding. The definition of large, in this case, was pipe you could theoretically drive a car through. Just to weld the pipe together from plate steel, one would have to weld together a rig to hold the plate, as well as a roller press to bend the plate correctly.<p>People would be astounded that I, a software developer, would hold a welder in such high esteem, but while I might be (my own, probably faulty estimate) in the top 10,000 he was in the top 100 (again my own, probably faulty estimate). I've seen him walk into a job that took three "lesser" welder (mind you, these are family members, so please don't call them out as such) six hours and complete it in 20 minutes.<p>I'm what one might call a 10x programmer. That said, he was at least a 100x welder. Alas, he died due to a lung full of chromium, which is a real risk when welding the exotic metals that generally the top welders are asked to work.<p>I miss him dearly, and Lon (Lonnie) if you can read this from heaven, you're still the best damned welder I've ever seen, and a true master of your craft. You inspire me to do better than I do. I only hope to become as good in my field as you are in yours.
Women would be much better welders than men, because they don't wear their testicle outside close to the welding area, avoiding the most common welders desease, testicular cancer. In the European eastern block countries there are much more female welders.<p>Welders don't really like their plastic testicles.
Only 5.3%? That's a lot more than I expected.<p>> 'comparing me to my co-worker: “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.”'<p>That's just harmless workplace banter. Why not just joke back? If that's worst example of 'sexism' she experienced, then the headline should read: "Welding profession is the least sexist profession in the world". Far less sexist than nursing or academia...<p>> Although I have a good gig as a full professor at Iowa State University, I’ve daydreamed about learning a trade – something that required both my mind and my hands.<p>I'm skeptical. I think you daydreamed about writing an article about workplace sexism and welding was just a means to that end.
> One man, watching me while I cut 8-foot lengths of tubing for him, told me that I could simply hook my tape measure over the saw blade and subtract ⅛-inch to find the correct length. Piqued after I explained why his method wouldn’t work for a precise measurement, he responded by quizzing me on something I wasn’t likely to know: the purpose of the black diamonds on my tape measure.<p>Perhaps I'm picturing the situation wrong, but why wouldn't it work on the precision levels of a tape measure?
Are there actually any women in this conversation? I find many of the comments at YC to be obnoxiously male dominant and condescending, this comment section included. It's been frustrating me for quite a while now.<p>Would guess only 5.3% of YC readers are female. And would say, it's posh, not "real world," and it's not comfortable even though I'm a very strong woman - and a welder.
Ex Mil will mansplain anything to anyone. It's coded in behaviour. Pretty sure she got some sexism but also, pretty sure some was receiver-sender impedence mismatch and also nongendered "I do this because it's my culture" behaviour.<p>I agree some of this is class warfare not gender warfare.<p>Liked the article. Odd to say that of a sad observation of life's iniquities, but it's a good article I think.
A professor my wife had in her feminist studies class confided in my wife that she enjoyed having her in class (my wife leans conservative), because she (the professor) had gotten tired of the bubble. Her professor was raised lower-middle class and spent many years in trucking before entering academia, and was just tired of the constant echo chamber that academia has become. This woman seems to have done the opposite. Good for her.<p>For me personally, despite being in tech in a well paying job, at my church and at various volunteer groups I'm part of, I am exposed to people of all backgrounds. And of course, growing up middle class and seeing how my friends and family behaved, I feel way more comfortable among what I consider 'normal' people. It's like two different worlds at work versus in person. Luckily, I'm now at a chipmaker where people seem more level-headed. Something about having to interact with physical constraints makes people more moderate I think. The SW startup world is so far off the rails, I found it difficult to relate.
> Another man commented on my appearance, comparing me to my co-worker: “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.” Such harassment remains common for tradeswomen<p>Is this really harassment? It sounds kinda humorous or complimentary. Author seems to have no sense of humour.
Welding Example:<p>Brother and I bought and old Chevy. Front end parts so badly worn that could turn steering wheel about 20 degrees before the wheels moved!<p>Used bumper jacks to raise the front end and rest it on concrete blocks. Took out everything from the steering wheel to the front wheel. The springs were dangerous -- kaBOOM!<p>Took the worn parts to a Chevy parts department -- they enjoyed helping a teenager do it yourself, first time.<p>Installed the new parts: Had no spring compressor so used two bumper jacks;
had them supporting the car while also using the jacks on the lower A-frames to compress the springs. kaBOOM! as one of the jacks slipped, the spring expanded, the lower A-frame rotated ~180 degrees and hit near the center of the frame (but not me!).<p>Drove the car to our Buick dealer (family car was a Buick) to have the front end aligned. Mechanic was surprised and pleased to see the work done -- all nice clean parts correctly installed! But he said he couldn't do the alignment because he needed a <i>bending bar</i> for the king pin (vertical heavy iron bar connecting the outer ends of the lower and upper A-frames) so sent me to the shop of a friend. The friend said "Bet you got these nuts too tight ... no you didn't. How'd you know to do that?" Had read a maintenance manual at the city library. He said "We get those manuals ..."!<p>Shocks were part of the upper A-frame pivots and poor. At a parts shop, got two <i>piston</i> shocks that looked about right, were officially for some Mercury car, and drove to a muffler shop for the needed welding. The shop was pleased to help a do it yourself teenager and with a challenge well outside their usual welding. So, with some fabrication and welding, they got each shock attached to the frame and the front side of the lower A-frame. Worked great for years!<p>Lesson connected with the OP: People can like helping a teenager do it yourself, alone, a first time, with too little or nothing in information and tools and facing some danger. The muffler shop liked the challenge of doing the one-off, first-time, innovative fabrication and welding! Such a teenager can get a good welcome and respect.
it reads a bit like this prof learned welding to diminish the dignity of the men who do it for a living. It reminds me of that old Pulp lyric, "and when roaches climb the walls, you can call your dad and stop it all." where in this case it's academic credentials that will forever take her out of the working class.<p>I can think of a few instances where I would have looked past women in trade shops and have made a concerted effort not to, but it was because the value in skilled trades work is more than the transaction. there's a significant and physical trust component involved and also an implied relationship with aspects of reciprocity that come with the work. part of that is assessing whether the person you are dealing with can signal the values to facilitate that trust. tropes about sexism don't capture that nuance.<p>we can talk about sexism from men all day, but for men who are contenders for finding wives and having kids, when young working class women have "a man whose boss is another woman" in the top of their selection criteria, you will see guys lining up to welcome women into trades. until then, the stated reasons for why women don't feel welcome in them will seem inconsistent, evasive, and won't bear much scrutiny.<p>what the criticisms and entire worldview of the prof seem to lack is an understanding of human desire.
great that she learned a useful skill. not great that she's coopting it to drive a narrative from her institutional background at the expense of men for whom this is their actual livelihood.
Is it just me or do others not care if the welder is a man or a woman. I just want my welds to hold.<p>If she struggles when they ask her to do a 6mm and 8mm weld, guess what, then she shouldn’t get the job. If she does it properly, maybe she should.
Complaining about being tired and having to squat to lift things? It’s the job.
And having someone tell you your hands are dirty is now harassment? Maybe customer didn’t want a super dirty invoice. Guess what librarians deal with homeless creepers all the time. Welders are not uniquely harassed.<p>People really ought to have a poll on whether this whole woke equal nature of things matters. In WW2, we had plenty of Rosie the Riveter working. Now less so. Times change, jobs change.<p>I just want my welds not to break.
Cool.<p>I keep wondering if Kurtis from Cutting Edge Engineering will eventually borrow the camera and have Karen do some gouging, metal deposition, and/or MIG welding on stuff to show how fun it is. Also, the combination of liquid nitrogen and flame for interference fit parts is pretty cool too.
Jives with all the trades in general. Sometimes you have people being insulting who are genuinely trying to have fun with you, other times it's just people using that as a cover to be assholes. Often you are expected to just take brutal conditions with a smile even though they aren't safe and even though everyone knows you should say no, but no one wants to be "that guy". Customers can be condescending and mean, often for no real reason other than that's who they are and the trades in general put up with that kind of person because they don't have the draw of higher end gigs.
> I’ve daydreamed about learning a trade – something that required both my mind and my hands.<p>Respect to her for actually doing it unlike every other email-job-holder who just revels in telling other people to learn a trade.
Should this even be discussed here? It’s not tech-related, and the "all professions need to be at least 50% female“ argument always leads to the same, emotional discussions.
If you want to look at hidden GDP women and access to power tools is probably a big one.<p>Lighter batteries and brushless and mass production allowing for a quick jump in and companies like Ryobi's making tools look good (but not cliched pink) and how-to's on TikTok have changed the landscape.<p>We have gone from upkeep at home to asset building.<p>Some of this will go to careers, but it's not that simple.<p>HN isn't mature enough to discuss this but men die in dirty jobs, no one really cares. For every one who dies many are hurt and for the many injuries there are many many near misses.<p>A near miss is often about reaction times and strength. These 1% issues are the problem. You are 3 hours from anywhere and stuck in mud by yourself and the tool kit is missing. So you can get the 5.3% up, but it can't be 50%