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.
IDK, I think it's to enforce pecking orders based on stuff you can't at all help. I grew up working class and hated it--it's essentially bullying, no matter how you look at it.
It's one thing to make lighthearted jokes about some stuff you did, like "remember the time you forgot to base64 decode the images and stored garbage in the DB". It's entirely another to bully people for who and what they are. You're basically daring people to get somehow violent with you to get you to stop, and besides that being dangerous, a lot of people would rather not. It also creates this dynamic where people willing to be violent avoid bullying and rise ok the pecking order, and those who aren't don't.
On my way to a "white collar" job, I worked construction. It was stage building, which is the kind of construction that "blue collar" workers routinely laughed at, but it was still hard, physical work.
How did I get my promotion that made the job worthwhile? A person fell 30 feet onto concrete. The next week, I was replacing him, with all of the risks he had, and the potential outcome.
That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away).
People claim "simple" when they mean "my way". People claim lack of "knowing how to use the language" when the wrong ideas get injected into a language (I'm personally looking at you Perl, but now that I'm working Golang, it's starting to feel too familiar).
The truth is, there is often more than one way to solve a problem, but an strong willed person won't see it that way. I've walked away from plenty of marginally (and I mean marginally) better solutions just to compromise to some form of a solution than I care to enumerate. One can't win such arguments.
I agree, it's not malicious, but is is egotistical. I've even won solutions where I said "Let's all agree that you're right, and then let's accept the code as-is." This industry is improved compared to decades before, but it's not yet fully rational, or even fair.
That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away).
As a programmer, I've worked in places and with people who were straight-up sociopathically abusive and I've worked with people who were absolutely respectful and reasonable and groups that were in-between. The co-workers, the boss, the company and location's culture all went into this.
Thing about this is - since it is variable, since it is not necessary, there's no excuse for it as a natural thing, in any industry. Also, while sometimes it's the result just dysfunction (the "tolerant" boss who tolerates psycho team lead) but often it's a strategy for extracting more work for people (at Intel, for example).
A lot of the specifics mentioned in the article aren't specific to her being a woman. Many guys just talk about things differently; they will banter about themselves and how any lady is easier on the eyes then any man. That's not sexism; that's just reality of what a guy thinks and banters about. And an average guy is stronger then the average girl; that's biology. Most guys don't care what sex you are, so long as you can do the work, don't complain much, and can afford banter to make the day go by faster.
The one that got me was the comment about a customer looking past her at a co-worker, even though she was older than he was, and "for all they know, more experienced". But, she's not actually more experienced, she's new at the job, which might have been evident (this detail is left out). Anyway, judging someone's competence based on their age, which she expected them to do, is hardly better than doing it based on their sex.
If the customer was trying to guess which of two people in front of them might be a welder, and only 5% of welders are female, it's not irrational to assume that it's the man. The customer may never have seen a female welder before. Until they say something like you can't be a welder, you're a woman, I think the generous reading would be that the customer is having their priors updated in real time, not necessarily that they're a misogynist.
I thought similar. Anyone moving from an office environment to one of physical work is going to struggle both with the physical challenges and the workplace culture. Trippily so coming from academia!
As someone who started their career in an office environment, then went to grunt work, and now back in an office and a remote WFH job. I don't think it would be a struggle. Would it be different? Of course... physical labor is the complete opposite of office work. Would it be harder than sitting in a chair pressing buttons?... sure. But it wouldn't be a struggle. It would be more of a struggle working with people that don't understand what context is or what nuances are.
It's not the work or the culture, it's the people. The type that would call you a vagina for wanting water on a hot day to avoid dehydration. Or the boss that will tell you "you think too much" when you come to them with an idea that increases productivity. But ya, the work or culture would be a piece of cake to navigate. For me, often time it's the idiots you have to work with that usually make a place a shit place to work.
The "physical work workplace culture" fits me much better: more fun, less stringent, less talking behind someones back because maybe he/she made a non-PC remark, no one will go cry to HR for a remark you made that was not even about them personally...
I don’t miss many things from my last blue collar job, but it was so much more relaxed. My coworkers all felt much more “real”. Too bad the pay wasn’t there, or I’d still be doing it.
What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one...
I read the article. There is zero indications anywhere in the article that this is the case, none.
Notably, the authors describes both her experience and the experience of other women. And they don't like but they expect and let it roll off their backs.
Sure, some work places have culture of "good-natured razzing" but others have a culture of straight-bullying. Sometimes the bullying comes from people who are damaged themselves and other times it comes from a company or a manager who believes this lets them control their workers (not always incorrectly). Either the bullying doesn't serve the workers.
But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
A second of thought should show this kind of generalization is impossible. You're engaged in the classic "I know the working class and they are exactly this way" sophistry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've found that the shop talk communities end up with stronger bonds and generally more real friendships vs office friendships which are very weak.
It makes me think it's a somewhat innate way to foster relationships. It definitely seems to break down walls. I've come to learn that the more a group roasts you the more they like you.
This is an idea that is promoted by the media. Occasionally it is true.
After eight years of working in the military, it only took two years before I never heard from another member of my unit. Within the first three months of leaving, only one person kept in touch (for the two years). When they moved out-of-state, I never heard from them either.
Don't underestimate the perception of what happens with what is likely to happen. I don't think it differs much between "the shop" and "the office" having worked in both. How many people do you talk to on a weekly basis from your last company?
My strongest lifelong work friends definitely came from grad school where none of that happened. Or from research work where it didn't either. But there it was pressure and performance and cooperation that helped. It breeds trust.
In blue collar work, esp team oriented which it often is, I'm not sure it's the shop talk or the team/trust environment. Either way i felt the same bond to people making pizza 5 busy nights in a row as I did late night coding sprints while pair programming, or contorting under the steel hull of a target boat to reach a bad CPU while my colleague watched the terminal while seasick and we are both drinking diesel funes.
It's about shared trust I think. The level of casualness of shop talk is just an indicator and kind of a stress test of bonds.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. It's something about the level of pressure but a lot of us software guys have pressure but don't get the same relationships blue collar workers get. I've done both industries (industrial construction and programming), and I definitely found it much easier to make lasting friendships in the construction one even though I experienced similar pressures
It's something to do with the casualness or gruffness of it that makes it better. Office environments are so sterile. Maybe it's the lack of HR. lol
Bonds forged in fire are stronger - this has been known since Rome needed soldiers. Bootcamp doesn't require sleep deprivation, adversarial leadership,and that level of physical strain, but shared suffering increases unit cohesion.
I choose less suffering at my work, I can choose my friends from other circles, thank you very much.
So can "corporate talk" at a white collar job. There are days where I want to vomit after hearing about "stakeholders", "action items", and "alignment". I'd prefer crude jokes to that, even if they were directed at me.
It's a little different when people are regularly talking about your genitals or sexual preferences or histories or your family reputation. And in public. And in team meetings.
That kind of thing rarely comes up in corporate america. In corp/academia people just like to imply you're lazy or unintelligent, subtly and frequently. But yeah, white collar jobs are annoying as well. That's why we all get paid to do them.
Because I've heard different levels and amounts of insults. It can just be some harmless dad jokes and softball stuff you'd hear in white collar work. It can just be outright sexual harassment. It depends so much on your environment that it's hard to pin down a universal "standard" .
I realize I made a throw away account just to post this, but try reflecting shop talk back to white men with white stereotypes
They often can't take the shit they give out. You won't know who's-who until you get undermined behind your back and they start fucking with your work
The insecure ones blend in with the ones who can actually take the shit they give and it's the collective support of giving shit to non-white men in the trades that's the problem
It's high school bullies trying to present as it being all in good fun when it rarely is
It's never in fun. I don't mind a good razzing. But when it's constant or every day or you're the only one razzed because people like laughing at your no nonsense attitude when you get riled up at their stupidity it's like living in a courtroom of idiocracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU
> Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead.
There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.
Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.
See, I kind of agree that there are certain types of sexism like assumptions that women won't get their hands dirty or patronising artificial politeness that are purely middle class constructs.
But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...
It is only when someone think they have power over someone else that they allow themselves to be inappropriate on the workplace. My mom was a nurse before forming nurses, and lived through that (from doctors especially). Her best friend was a security guard at diverse places, but she started at a mall (where she has "wild" stories as you put it. Confirmed 100% always her manager or customers, once the day manager was put on ice for harassment, his replacement ended the night by touching her butt the day he arrived. Crazy that people do that).
But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy).
I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?
My guess would be that it's less about "position of power" and more about "less likely to face consequences". You see the same type of behavior in a variety of cases
- Construction workers hooting and whistling at women
What is power, if not the ability to do what you want without facing consequences? If other people already support you or are indifferent, no power is needed to do what you want.
> It is only when someone think they have power over someone
Isn’t that kind of the point though? That the racist and the sexist and the queerbasher think they have power over the group they’re bigoted against - and that’s what lends them the confidence to act mean?
Yeah that's normal, like we short fat guys are never popular with girls. Learnt that from teenages and firmly believe that biologically people look down on each other.
societally. what amounts to attractiveness can vary a lot more than you think throughout cultures and times.
But yes, people have always been in competition biologically to flaunt success and pick the best mating partner. You can do that through putting others down or otherwise controlling a mate. And the dimorphic needs between sexes only intensifies this. I'm no sociologist but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a universal experience.
Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
> It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons
This probably seems obviously true to you but it should not. Some people think there's a reasonable amount of banter, sometimes at the expense of another acquaintance, before it becomes bullying or unacceptable in the workplace.
Without wanting to indulge too much in macho tropes: A welding shop is inherently dangerous. If you spend long enough in one, you are going to get seriously injured at some point. You are going to be the first responder when someone else gets seriously injured. Surviving in that environment requires a certain level of toughness. I'm not defending bullying, but some places aren't supposed to be welcoming.
I worked construction for a few years after high school and the only injuries I received on the job was from bullying/hazing (minor, but still). Never mind the stupid shit they did that could have hurt someone, but luckily didn't.
People who work dangerous jobs can get pretty callous about it. I saw people doing dangerous shit constantly. And the people with permanent injuries end up using gallows humor to cope.
I just looked it up. Welding is definitely not a safe profession, but it seems like severe injury rates is around 3.5 per hundred workers throughout a whole career. Definitely not "most". And about the same or slightly less than carpentry (4 per hundred), which from personal experience is a profession filled with decent and friendly people.
There's a lot of potential for petty injuries that'll be a nuisance for weeks to months. Minor burns, slightly smashed fingers or hands, some real good cuts, etc. Not a lot of potential for serious injury though above the baseline of your environment (i.e. air conditioned shop vs muddy trench)
I did a couple of years at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego as a welder after the first .com crash.
The (literal) toxic work environment is why I left welding, even though I genuinely enjoyed the work. But I was already starting to see real changes in my health, even though I was super careful about respirator use, etc. What really sealed the deal was learning that my shift lead, who I thought was a good decade older than me, was actually a few years younger, but had just been welding longer, with the body damage to show for it.
Yea, that’s one thing that really stood out to me when I did a 2 year mechanical engineering program - mostly training to be a cad jockey. Some of my teachers looked waaay older than they should have, and the welding instructor was the worst.
Now think of how many guys there are out there doing it with no repository protection and the good ‘ole safety squints.
Per hundred workers. Your link is in absolute units of fatalities, their claim is a rate. At the very least, you need the number of workers (which is also available in BLS data) to refute their claim.
The data shows roughly 454k workers in the welders, solderers, and brazers occupation series. With their claim of 3.5 severe injuries per 100 worker-careers, that's about 16k severe injuries. If you assume an average career is about 25 years, that's about 636 severe injuries per year, compared to the 48 fatalities per year. So it's an order of magnitude higher (which I think is the direction most people would expect).
The main factor driving safety is experience. I suspect shop talk does indeed correlate, but I think it's a mistake to assume causation. Put differently, the number of angry words thrown around being a major contributing factor to an accident response strains belief. It's experience.
Why would the risk of either being injured or treating injury require you to be the target of bullying or a bully?
Wouldn’t it be in your best interest to be kind and supportive to one another in such a dangerous / difficult environment? That way everyone is happy and confident and focuses on the stresses of the job, not the stress of being bullied or being cajoled into bullying for the sake of conformity?
What you’re describing sounds like it really only appeals to a certain kind of person, and I don’t understand how that kind of person makes a better welder.
On some level, you're describing a difference between traditional male bonding (joking and "razzing") and traditional female bonding (being kind and supportive). Both of these can be positive and both can be toxic - bullying is an obvious case, but just ask anyone who has been in a supposedly "supportive" environment filled with backstabbing and gossip how nice that is.
I don't know why there's a need to define either of these as inferior and wrong - isn't the point of diversity to allow people from different backgrounds to take different approaches?
To me, personally, the "kind, supportive" style often comes off as insincere. It's actually a barrier to me trusting someone. But I don't know, maybe that's just me.
What on earth? Yeah, if I work in a dangerous profession, I want my coworkers to be people I trust, not people who bully me because I stand out. Honestly, if it's a dangerous workplace, shouldn't we be looking out for each other instead of making casually sexist comments at the only woman in the shop?
It’s not just fun, but the least offensive way of establishing hierarchy, which is required to form a group, in men. They ask you who you are. A reference to some rule (e.g. what’s acceptable) is by definition a confrontation. A refusal to position yourself in a group, which is tested/offered by poking a person, makes you a questionable element in it. Yes, all this is mostly pointless in a modern life. But that’s how an average hunting-age male works.
The attributes and reasons do not matter in isolation. They will find where to poke even if you’re a twin of one of the group members. Red hair is just the obvious one to use.
The alternative is going to the office, filtering thoughts in your mouth and reporting slight misspeaks and inappropriately timed eye contacts to a special manager who then decides who’s higher in hierarchy according to some rules.
Is that not down to the culture? I found some of the warmest workplaces were also the places were everyone was constantly shitting on each other and not taking it too serious. I'd not say it was bullying, as everyone got a piece. There was a certain toughness to it, but at the same time everyone was caring deeply for one another.
If the target of your joke isn't laughing (if they're upset by it), then it's not a joke, it's bullying. If they _are_ laughing/enjoying it, then it's playful banter. You're right, it very much varies by culture (culture here being as specific as "the specific group of people")
Spent a lot of time in hunting and fishing parties with near constant teasing and in those situations its usually the rudest and most egotistical jerk who doesnt laugh and enjoy. They cross the line repeatedly, everyone takes it in good nature while internally counting the incidents, then eventually someone takes them down a peg and they act like a child.
In a culture where banter is accepted, sometimes someone will be upset by something.
I think the current tendency to prevent all possibility to upsetting behaviour is overshooting the mark.
Against bullying is a good movement.
Against all possibly upsetting remarks is basically being against banter and killing a part of what makes us human. I hope that free speech remains allowed and to some extend "uncancelable".
>It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.
Dudes in dangerous professions bond by calling each other slurs which is ok because they're all in on it, such that if you can't handle some bad words how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs, so you're either not cut out for the job.
You as an outsider from the nice people bubble don't have a say in this to lecture them since you're not in on it.
Sounds like an opportunity for any of the wealthy left-leaning people to start a competitor and seize market share by hiring those traditional companies consider undesirable.
Great at excluding snowflakes which is what you want in those dangerous professions. If you get pissy that someone called you ginger, you're clearly not cut for any demanding and dangerous job. Better stay in your sanitized white collar safe space while you tweet how the world is mean.
Apparently a lot of construction, extraction installation, maintenance and repair folk have a very bad time of i. Perhaps if they could get decent support in the work place that wouldn't happen. Though I suppose you'd probably conclude it's just natural attrition as the snowflakes kill themselves.
Have you ever attended a mandatory DEI meeting? The entire premise of that industry is to tell you which slurs are acceptable (ie: cisgender ) and which are not.
"Cisgender" is a slur the same way "male", "heterosexual", and "white" are (I am all three; four, including cisgender). In other words, it is not a slur.
Slur isn't an intrinsic property of a word: it's a property of how it's used. "Male" can be a slur, as can "heterosexual", or "management". In theory, "cisgender" can also be a slur, though I've never heard such a use. (You'll sometimes hear "cissy", but I've never heard that used against a specific person.)
You might argue that "punching up" is acceptable, or even that it's not slurring by definition (which I'd dispute), but membership of one "privileged class" doesn't automatically translate to actual privilege. (I think the feminists call this intersectionality.) In such a context, the labels of "privileged classes" absolutely can be used to punch down (e.g. saying "you're such a man" and slamming the door in the face of an impoverished gay transgender man trying to access domestic abuse services).
The usage of the word "slur" in question -- it has to be this if it's on a list one can learn from DEI consultants -- is
a derogatory or insulting term applied to a particular group of people.
It is inherent in the term itself, not in its use.* So it isn't simply anything that can be understood as an insult. All the stuff about "punching up" and so forth is beside the point.
"cisgender" has a technical meaning which is still it's primary use: someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (so it can apply to intersex people as well). In this it is like "heterosexual" and "male". Arguably it is not like "white", in that who counts as white is malleable, but for the most part whatever it is, in most contexts, "white" is not a slur either.
* I am in fact a lapsed linguist. I have a PhD. My specialization was in semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is meaning encoded in language. Pragmatics is meaning inferred from use: "it's cold in here" meaning "shut the window", for example. I am aware that one can talk more precisely and at much, much greater length about all of this. But this is Hacker News, so this is all I am going to say.
What does any of this have to do with what they said? There's a difference between an in-group privately calling each other whatever and said in-group directing it towards someone not part of said group.
That is the point of the banter: to see how you handle stressful situations.
Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
Why? For every accident, there are around twenty near misses. For every near miss there are several situations that could have gone bad very quickly unless the person on the spot remains calm and acts rationally.
It is essential to know how you behave under stress in most blue collar work. They're not being assholes for fun; they're doing it to save lives.
And even if it was and watching sport or going down the pub was in fact an extremely safety-conscious environment compared with the sterility and politeness of, say, the aerospace industry, it's not entirely clear how encouraging people to either escalate or laugh off would help them deal with actual danger which generally requires neither of the above...
It's not about the social actions, it's the traits they represent. Are you quick-witted? Do you freeze or overreact and lash out, behave erratically? Do you stay calm? Can you think fast enough under pressure to choose to say and do things that result in laughter or de-escalation, or escalate in a way that shows you're communicating on the same level (i.e. tease back, but not overdo it and insult the other person)?
If I can't stay calm and think rapidly under mild social pressure without threat of bodily harm or lost lives, I personally wouldn't feel honest in telling my teammates, "yes, if you or I are in a situation with risk to life or limb, you should trust that I'll handle it appropriately and protect myself and/or you."
Sorry, without some sort of data I’m refusing to believe that social adeptness has anything to do with ability to act in an emergency or other high pressure situation.
My own experience in tall ships and shipyards, where there are plenty of life and death decisions is not that.
There are people that I can fluster easily in a social situation that are perfectly calm and capable in high pressure dangerous situations. There are people that are practically insult comedians that I wouldn’t want driving a car in the same parking lot.
Not to mention that people doing boring, safe jobs behave like that too. Trust me, when I have the banter with my friends in the pub, I'm really not evaluating whether I can rely on their accountancy or web design to save my life
What actually seems to be the common factor is male groups in informal settings
No, I don't think ability to banter has any relationship with ability to properly handle those risky situations. There's zero intrinsic reason why someone who freezes when insulted must also freeze if a bay crane lift starts going wrong, because to me they are clearly different kinds of stress.
Sterility and politeness is variable, but I also work in that industry and have yet to encounter a situation where the banter resembles that of a largely risk free but comparably male environment like, say a sports ground or pub lunch with friends I've known since we were kids.
Which is a good thing really, because I wouldn't want to think that people were actually determining fitness to be trusted with a soldering iron or embedded systems design based on their witty comebacks or tolerance for jokes about their wife.
i agree it's not cunning or a plan, but that doesn't exclude the possibility that this is an evolutionary/societal adaptation that _really works_.
Two things can be true at the same time: that this type of banter has undesirable consequences as well as desirable ones. This type of nuance is generally the sort of thing that's worth trying to understand before you try to 'fix' it.
> Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
I completely agree with you about the purpose and value of banter- but do you actually know any women or interact with any on a regular basis?
It's simply not true- women banter with each other just as much as men do, and they especially banter with men they are interested in romantically- for the exact reason you mention - to see if they handle stressful situations well, which is a desirable (attractive) trait in a romantic partner.
I'll admit women tend to be more subtle with this then men- such that some people (especially the ones who are failing the test) will mistake it as complaining or arguing.
I enjoy it very much when my wife does this- I usually respond by turning it into some kind of joke, or turning it back on her in a way she doesn't expect, and I can see her light up with joy that I 'got it' and didn't respond with frustration/etc.
My mother and father were both fishermen. They would've shitcanned someone firing off slurs in the middle of a stressful situation, because if you're doing that then you're making a stressful situation worse.
This is so bizarre. No, it's not. It's to shit on the new guy because he's new or different or whatever. You just made up a post-facto justification for bullying out of whole cloth and tried to make it sound like some social benefit.
It’s strange but it’s a fine line. Being made fun of your physical attributes is pretty par for the course in most male groups and it paradoxically makes the place more comfortable to be in. Women just don’t get how this works. Obviously I’m talking about most places. Sometimes it’s just truly evil bullying because they genuinely hate you.
That is not true. The goal of banter isn't to belittle others seriously, it is often just used to break the ice or for some fun in between work. It is not about a group bullying another.
Many places that require nice language are far more toxic. Or perhaps any place with strict behavior and language rules is toxic, it often seems to be the case.
The parent said that women don't get it. I disagree, most of them working in such environments get it just like men. There are some exceptions for either gender.
Close people can joke like that. Joking like that before you become close is rough attempt at manufacturing closeness fast. If it works it works, if it doesn't it gets nasty.
Why? Men make fun of themselves and each other all the time. It's how we talk. It honestly isn't negative; it's almost a form of banter that tells the truth in a low-key softball way where we can all laugh.
Why is banter not acceptable? Who went and took the fun out of life? I'm not talking here about purposefully mean banter or taking things too far. But come on, who made these "rules" you speak of?
Banter is wonderful when you are part of the in group, especially if you are the dominant player in that group. But it is often used by members of the in group to marginalise those outside and to maintain the dominance of the leading players in the in group.
I like how you've defined yourself as the norm and not the GP, even though you're both calling from your personal experience with a sample size of one.
It's fascinating for me to watch these comment threads blow up, I hadn't thought this would take off so much.
It's a constant stream of "but my guys don't do this" "but my guys do do this".
It's all just rephrasing of, well, this is the highbrow culture, and this is the working class culture, and I'm in one or the other and you're abnormal.
The reality is that it's just two different worlds and where they clash things get weird.
Looking at _so many_ responses to my post, almost none of which actually have new content, makes me think this is some sort of dead internet bots vs. bots contest.
Only one side is making positive claims in this thread.
I never made a claim that "all men do X" or that "shop talk and banter are fairly universal". I did point out that I and my friends do not mock our friends and colleagues.
Still avoiding positive claims, but here are some normative claims:
- I object to claiming that mocking is normal and acceptable in all groups of men
- some, not all, working class subcultures use mocking as a shibboleth
- this aspect of those subcultures is not a thing I think "we" should valorize
Fair, but trying to enforce "you're never allowed to mock people, even when those people expect enjoy it and it's all in good fun" also makes you an asshole. Different behaviors are appropriate for different groups. I have groups I swear in, and ones I avoid it in. Same thing.
Mockery can be cruel, and even gentle mocking can be irritating or even harmful if it's very repetitious. Mockery is not always appropriate, or even truly funny. Mocking others is not an especially important activity or an especially important form of humor.
Even so, categorical prohibitions of mockery (in society, in particular workplaces, whatever) are truly and obviously joyless propositions. Maybe they're warranted in some contexts! But to say 'there can be no mockery' is indeed inherently stifling.
Almost every time someone brings it up, people dismiss sexism, racism, etc. and their impacts. If I want to know the impact of, e.g., weather on farming, or the hurricane, I ask someone who has experienced it. This person had these experiences; you didn't but that's irrelevant.
> posh ... highbrow
It's using a stereotype as argument - perhaps not coincidentally - rather than listening to what people actually say.
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 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.
I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.
Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.
Look at it more like part of the education system.
Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.
And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.
I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011.
Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.
Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.
"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".
You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.
If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.
But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.
There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US
We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.
> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?
All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.
Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.
Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.
Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.
Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?
> find middle class folk ... to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.
I think it's the betwixt and between dynamic: working class folk know they're living on what they have coming; upper class folk know they're living on what they have; but middle class folk, no matter how they live, are only middle class folk if other middle class folk agree they are — hence the insecurity, and at one reason for the conformity.
One point that Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System makes over and over (maybe never quite explicitly, but implicitly, throughout) is that Fussell’s “middle class” is essentially defined by being thoroughly pathetic. They’re the most class-concerned, by far, desperately anxious to signal higher class, while having no clue how to correctly do that. An Upper-Middle spots them a mile away, to say nothing of Upper. To Proles, their preferences and behavior are grating or risible. They end up jockeying awkwardly for position only amongst themselves.
There are many taxonomies of people. Workers vs owners is one, and relates to the relationship between people and the means of production. Other taxonomies are young vs old, male vs female, and class structures with more than two classes. Notice that this thread has been about social class, more than economic class.
I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.
I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.
What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).
Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
It's hard to put into words. I think the essence of you questions is "what is your philosophy now, and how does it differ from before?" That's a question I've been struggling to conceptualize myself for a while now, so I can't describe it with any sense of coherence in a public forum.
I will say that, at the root of it all, we are who we orbit.
> Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
I was once in an environment where, depending upon how I was dressed, I would either be addressed in english and called "Sir" or addressed in spanish and called "Paisano".
Why was the community surprising? (I mean, my mental model is that most dyadic social interactions can be approached with either authority or community, so I'm not surprised that groups without much authority tend to play the community card instead)
> 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 find the same (also in the UK) from having lived in (and grown with) a non-western culture. One that is also uptight (much more so in many ways, and definitely sexist) but in a different way.
> 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
I am quite surprised at the extent to which gender stereotypes are pervasive. At a bonfire last weekend kids were being sold illuminated toys, and all the little boys had swords, and the girls had unicorns. My daughters would have wanted swords (they are teen and adult) but I have realised that is unusual.
Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I’ve also seen this. There’s more of an acknowledgment: that people will be attracted to each other (or not),the status/dating games people play will be out and open. It will be acceptable to talk about physical/sexual qualities of your coworkers, etc. That when you are in physically close proximity you might see each others sexual parts and comment on them. It will be understood that after a breakup people will be less amicable.
You can also see this in literature: look at Les Miserables. In the factory they talk about sexual fantasies of the foreman. Whereas in the context of the upper classes it’s talked about in context of love/romanticism.
Contrary to popular believe, I find this much healthier. Emotions expressed can be dealt with and moved on. Emotions suppressed grow and fester. If it’s normal to talk about who’s is attracted to who, then everyone is aware of the sexual exploits of the general manager. Therefore people know where to set boundaries. If it’s hush hush kept quiet then the exploits of the Gm can grow.
I kind of get this for men, what you're saying makes sense and is for sure the healthier option if all was equal. The sticking point is the social and power asymmetry. Being commented on in that manner is low-key kind of threatening. The name of the game is appease the guy long enough for your friends to get you out of there. And when you're at work it's hard to just leave. Guys with nothing to lose don't take soft-nos for an answer and hard-nos are how you get assaulted, from experience that one.
The dynamic works when flirting is within a social circle because bad behavior risks your social status in the group and it works in bars because you're equals, around friends, and can just leave. At work, at least in an office, is kinda the worst combination. I've seen it work well outside of office settings because there aren't as complicated power dynamics— we're all equally in the shit in the kitchen.
pretty much all weird gender dynamics happen in upper class and posh environments. You won't find women on a farm afraid to get their hands dirty or men afraid to stitch something. People just do the jobs that are necessary. The entire idea that women are too pristine or fragile to do any work is basically an upper class fantasy because no working class household can afford to operate like this.
Whether its the military, manufacturing or agricultural environments, anywhere that's sort of blue collar or practical people aren't obsessed with their differences that much. I grew up in a rural environment and as kids boys would play with girls, as teenagers we'd go skinny dipping, there'd be none of the weird neurotic and insecure interactions I encountered when I went to university. There's entire categories of stereotypes and boxes highly educated and "high status" people invent to separate themselves in, not just along gender lines.
I think, not being able to tell whether someone's being friendly or abusive, is a classic sign that it's probably abusive. Also, abuse is generational, so this may be how people were treated when they were starting out themselves.
I love this post. It not only makes no sense whatsoever, it flattens gender, race, being ginger, and having tattoos into one uniform measure of Otherness in a way that preserves a magical naïveté and childlike wonder that’s absent in virtually every adult
Swearing and language rules are “made up”. The idea of harm is programmed into us.
People don’t riot despite receipts for priests molestation. They don’t riot over social scandal after social scandal. They’ll riot when they can’t feed their families. Most on the planet aren’t as obsessed with the pristine syntactic structures like the HN crowd. They never asked to exist and just want to live in conventional terms and die.
Like religion it’s just made up constraints; biological tick some all seeing eye will get mad.
Never welded professionally, but I learned to weld from a few friends, one was a woman who let me into the art school's jewelry shop. She considered welding as a trade, but as someone coming out of college, part of her hesitation was that she'd be starting fresh in the workforce and, as a welder, she'd be on a more senior payscale than many of the people she'd rely on on the job site. It wasn't a dynamic she wanted to be in.
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.
I agree, this is just an expression of the real world, and some people are uncomfortable with that. In my friends & coworkers circle, there are people of all varieties and it is the conservatives who are most honest. This morning they are affirming that the dems lost because a small fraction of the population ("the alphabet people" is the term I am seeing) don't understand their place, that the rest of the world does not want to live by their rules.
It's kind of gross, sure, if you're in that minority, but a part of me can appreciate that the conservatives are honest about what's in their hearts. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not.
Primary schoolers are the sweetest people in the world. It is middle schoolers that express adult emotions with no filter. Fortunately the filter does get more effective with practice, but it is always worth remembering that at their core, most people are not fundamentally different than they were in middle school.
This is common in software too. Like, you make fun of a guy for being from Kansas or generally non smart states as banter, and they'll get all riled up about it. Dude, we're just playing around about the L3 cache latency on a 9684X. It's okay if you don't know it. It's not malicious or anything. Just the amount of elitism this and elitism that. It's folks unfamiliar with an environment and the fact that some of the rough and tumble of life is helped by not being so sensitive.
There was a truth to the business about scolds and snowflakes. It's all right to have a bit of fun. No need to lose one's mind over it.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).
Do the women have to be the "care taker" and the men the "provider"? The proportion of jobs in developed economies that require physical strength is much lower than it used to be.
As a man who has been the primary parent for most of my children's lives (my ex is not very good with older children) I find the assumptions people make annoying. People are surprised my younger daughter lives with me rather than her mother. They struggle to find words to describe a man as primary carer.
I think this is damaging to men - bringing up children is incredibly rewarding and men are given a smaller role in it. Its damaging to women too.
Not everyone has to be - I do about half the childcare of my daughter and am often the odd-man-out at child activities. But most people have to be because that's what each sex wants. It's not a great plan to be looking for a partner by not having a job and telling everyone that your goal is to be a stay-at-home dad who wants a high-earning wife to support him. Women aren't interested in that.
> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target.
Just that it's "universal" doesn't mean it has to be that way. For fucks sake we all exchange 40 hours a week (or more) to our employers, on top of overtime and commute. There's no reason at all anyone should have to put up with unprofessional abusive/discriminatory bullshit from anyone, no matter if customers ("Karens") or coworkers.
At least the young generation got the message, this time they have the numbers advantage to actually demand meaningful change, and we're seeing the first effects of it - particularly in the trades, that fail to attract new trainees despite pretty competitive wages.
(The next thing I'd love to see on the chopping block is corporate politics, it's utterly amazing that everyone knows at least one horror story where endless amounts of money were wasted, sometimes entire companies sank because two middle manager paper pushers thought their fiefdom wars to be more important than the success of the company at large... but apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit)
This is like someone telling a fish that there are people who live on land, and the fish saying "it doesn't have to be that way". Someone mentions a cultural difference between your group and another, and you say "the other group is wrong, my culture is right".
Instead, what you could do is think about how this is a completely arbitrary thing that the two cultures just do differently, and that maybe people shouldn't be offended by friendly banter that isn't meant to offend.
I was in the US military. We all joked, in ways that probably shouldn't have been jokes, that we would "trip" on deployment to the "zone" causing trendily fire accidents for the least like members of our team.
Being US military didn't make it right, we were effectively deciding who we would kill in an effort to make the team more cohesive. That never set right with me, and I still remember the joke (but maybe it's not a joke, joke) to this day.
Don't look to the military as a model of good teamwork. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. One cannot pretend it's the right model to follow.
The line is mighty fine between bullying and good natured ribbing, and has a lot to do with group dynamics. Edgy banter can bring a group together, but bullying can do far more damage.
That's very reminiscent to arguments that western culture is just one of the possible cultures and is no better or worse than culture of pre-technological bushmen.
For a funny take on this, see the movie "Gran Torino", where two people excoriate each other viciously, until we the audience discover that they are actually two close friends.
Sadly, in our modern world people are not only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
Yes, if only we could aspire to ideals -- no doubt better modeled in some golden past far far from modernity -- where more "close friends" excoriate each other viciously, obviously that's perfectly healthy and nobody could possibly have any reasonable basis for preferring something else.
> only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
It's one thing if you or someone else personally enjoys some recreational conversational sadomasochism with the right partner, likely you can even persuade people to accommodate you with talk like that.
But the idea that there can't be genuine offense, only motivated offense attributed to some handwavy goal is clearly more projective pretense than anything like actual insight.
> apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit
They rarely know anything about what middle management is doing. After all, if you own any stocks, do you know anything about the middle managers in that corporation?
Guess why I'm out of the stocks game other than the occasional gamble of meme stonks. I'm German, we don't need it either way.
The thing is, we allow corporations to become (way) too fat. When a corporation grows too big, it grows uncontrollable as well - once the complexity of any corporation grows so large that there is no way for any single person to understand at least the basic scopes of everything the corporation's parts do at the same time, all kind of auditing and oversight becomes a sham, no matter if internal (boards) or external (consultancies, auditors, regulatory agencies).
You don't have to present a full strategy to discuss a problem. In my opinion a strategy is something to reach through discussion. Dismissing the discussion because of lack of results is counterproductive.
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.
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).
It flipped because the roles programmer (largely women) and analyst (mostly men) became programmer-analyst. The role women were dominating was collapsed into the one men already dominated.
At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.
[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.
This is the same in blue collar environments. They have more of the levity that I'm seeking regardless.
> 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.
Maybe this is it? I'm not fully convinced. I have worked with tech dorks that had a sense of humor, and that didn't bring contentious things to the working environment. Is it a lack of wit? I don't know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get, honestly.
This is an interesting question, so here's a bit of speculation.
Banter is a matter of wit. You could call it an intellectual pursuit.
Blue collar jobs are primarily not intellectual pursuits. They need their own kind of smarts, but these smarts are relatively orthogonal to the kind of linguistic smarts used in banter, and most importantly the work output itself is not intellectual. There's little chance of the banter directly getting into the work output, and so there's little direct motivation for bosses to police it.
Software development is basically entirely an intellectual pursuit that very much overlaps the wit of banter, and banter is likely to leak into the work output. Hence easter eggs are a thing. So, bosses are more likely to want to police banter-adjacent activities, which has a likely chilling effect on banter itself.
Another, more recent, factor is that more software development activity is online/remote and therefore lower bandwidth. The subtleties of banter don't convey as well as they would in-person.
>Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer.
HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules.
It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.
> It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
With regards to camaraderie and banter, I don't even want to talk about world views. I genuinely don't think they matter too much in that context. Really what I'm sick of is just a lack of any attempt to make a connection whatsoever. I don't need to align with a person politically or socially to build a connection and have good workplace banter. There's just such a fundamental unwillingness to do so, in my experience. That's what bugs me.
And I know the difference. I've been in both blue collar and white collar environments. Blue collar people look to build the connection and bond together almost immediately, just about every time. There's a period of 'feeling each other out' when you start on a new job or with a new coworker so that they can suss out _how to connect with you_. That's right: it's such a first-class citizen to their working relationships that there's an entire art form to initiating it.
Contrasting with the white collar environment... it's almost non-existent, unless you work with people who, ironically, come from blue collar environments. I think it's really sad, and I think we could benefit from being a little looser. I don't think that means we need to drag any contentious topics in, nor do I think it means that we need to drag ourselves into un-professionalism. There's just something to be said for being able to be goofy and chat with coworkers that seems to be lost on the white collar environment.
Harmony is the strength and support of all institutions. Banter and camaraderie build that harmony.
I don't know what this phenomenon is by which humans take personal experiences and attempt to extrapolate broad, sweeping generalizations and/or present anecdotal data as objective fact, but it's far too prevalent for my liking.
I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).
Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.
I've worked a fair bit in both environments. Maybe I've somehow missed out on 'the mean', but that's my experience. I've met the eclectic goofballs in tech too, but they're far from the norm.
There is always a fine line between professionalism and stick in your arse. Of course you need to know when such a culture is adequate and when it is not. If you work in support you probably don't banter with the people calling you. That would indeed be unprofessional.
Professionalism is to keep distance to others, banter is the opposite, as it is a form of bonding.
"Modern" workplaces that advertise themselves as such are very likely toxic. Might seem counter intuitive but it is often the case in reality.
Some Indian immigrants working in tech companies have also alleged they were subject to caste discrimination by other immigrants. I have no idea how common this is but there does seem to be some actual prejudice.
> “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.” Such harassment remains common for tradeswomen
If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.
Unless there was more to it the correct answer is along the lines of "yes thankfully" and then a laugh.
I'd recommend a good look in the mirror when looking for the problem in such situations.
Same goes for the thing about trying to discreetly notifying that someone has dirty hands:
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.
More generally the saying: "when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras" comes to mind:
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.
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.
As an isolated incident, it's charming. When it's every day of your life, it gets to be upsetting. Especially when past experiences have included more than on incident where the charming line was followed by anger and insults when it wasn't properly appreciated.
Ask your female friends if it's ever happened to them. I expect a large majority of them will be able to tell you a story.
Here's the best way I've been able to come up with, to get a feel for it. Suppose you have a nice watch. When somebody says, "Nice watch!", you say, "Thanks". But when you start meeting more than one person who won't stop talking about your watch, you get a little antsy. When somebody follows up with "Give me your fucking watch!" you start to think about leaving it at home some times.
Except that when you're a woman, you can never leave that at home.
This experience really isn't just about her. It's something practically all women experience. She seems to have just assumed her audience would share that context -- perhaps a side effect of being in academia.
You can choose your response to such things. Annoying, sure. Uncomfortable, sure. But that's life. At a certain point you have to just accept that things like the comment in the GP (which, to be clear, is the behavior I'm talking about here, not actual sexual harassment) will happen to you as a woman, and you can either get upset about it constantly and view yourself as a victim, or learn to accept that that's life.
People who are not women have to deal with such things as well, as a sibling commenter pointed out. Short guys, fat guys, skinny guys, they would all get picked on (in a friendly way or otherwise). The difference is that society will not tolerate them whining about it. Women won't care and men will laugh at them. So they suck it up.
It's frustrating when people say "just talk to a woman", as if all women have the same perspective on this, or women are the only ones who experience it. It's itself a sexist thing to say. I know women who don't have this kind of victim mentality and they're happier for it.
Or you know, we can collectively work on not making people uncomfortable because of who they are. Just because a behavior is very common today doesn't mean it is universal and written in our DNA. Society has become more tolerant over time, and that is a good thing. You wouldn't tell your female assistant to wear shorter dresses like in Mad Men, even if that wasn't considered unusual in the 60s.
I never claimed we should not strive for that kind of society. My points were that: 1) this is not a problem unique to women, 2) that comment specifically should only upset you if you have a very thin skin, and 3) having a very thin skin is not a good trait to have and everyone should strive to be able to handle comments like that without getting upset.
I actually think humans will never be able to achieve a utopia where no one will ever be made uncomfortable for who they are. One problem is that some people are more sensitive than others. Put another way, someone will always get offended at something. At some point you have to draw a line and say everything on this side of the line is fine, and if you get upset, it's _your_ problem.
>having a very thin skin is not a good trait to have
It is if you get leverage from it. There is a perverse incentive to have thin skin - in fact, you can get flak for not having thin enough skin, these days. I once heard someone call it "reverse CBT". I invented a game called "Take it Personal" to demonstrate how easy this is, where the participants say anodyne things to each other and are tasked with taking offense. It is an easy game, if an unhappy one.
No, receiving comments like "you're better looking than the guy before" is a part of life. Using the term "harassment", which is vague enough to cover both innocuous comments like that, and actually creepy disgusting stuff, is an easy way to create a strawman.
I think this is one of those cases where a strong majority of the population in question can handle the interactions just fine, but the ones who can not are extremely vocal about it. The complainers get their way and company policy is changed for everybody. Many people go "well, it was for the best I guess", but for others it is some whiner ruining the fun for everybody. In extreme cases we have national examples where people's entire careers have ended over a tasteless but largely harmless joke told decades earlier (See: Al Franken) and that kind of threat feels scary.
This has more nuance than just whiners vs normal people.
Using verboten words as an example, I'm often willing to stop using words that others don't like. The harm to me is low (english is a big language, there's plenty of other words left), so if there's any harm at all to another it's reasonable for me to stop using the word. Assessment of harm will vary, as will harm to me from loss of words - which is why I stand my ground on some technical words.
My line is,
n* - Not even going to type it
pronouns - Whatever floats your boat
master->main - Sure. Fine. I guess. Stop coming in my room and messing with my stuff.
master/slave->controller/peripheral - Really? I'm going to say no for now, but work on brevity and check back later.
MOSI/MISO->??? - NO.
Does drawing the line there make me a bigot? Where's the cutoff?
I still get flashes of the traumatic day when I was in the kitchen area at work making myself a cup of tea and one of the female employees came in and said "You are a strong and tall man, can you get that heavy box from the top shelf for me".
The supermarket encounters are most often dirty old women who are still stuck in the past, or have gotten away with it for so long they just don't know any better.
This counts as an inflammatory statement. Even thinking this is beneath a person of fairness. Those are people too. And you may not like the era they were in and you may want to redefine the era of today to some lala make-believe, but at no point should you disrespect and denigrate the people who don't buy in to your redefinition.
It is like saying: Windows developers are stupid and stuck in the past because they cannot get in line with programming on a mac. come on! they don't have to. And they don't want to.
It is like saying: dirty old man or even perverted old man. Which has probably been uttered 100s of thousands, maybe millions of times on this planet today in reference to men (those filthy perverts) interacting with others.
It's not sexual harassment, it's flattery to get you to do a favor for them. They would never sleep with you. It's also extremely normal and anodyne.
Why do men think sexism is symmetrical? The reason sexual overtures from men are a problem is because they are usually serious and they are statistically threatening, because men often hurt women who don't respond to them in a way they deem appropriate. You would never fear this woman.
As a fearful anxious man - Don't presume to know what I fear.
I expect variation in the women I meet, some will be scared of me and some have much bigger balls than I do. If I calibrate my banter such that 1% of women are scared, am I in the wrong?
It sounds like from your perspective, being better looking than their co-workers is a good thing. By and large, men are going to find women better looking than other men. That means the "better looking" comment is directly pointing out that the recipient of the comment is a woman.
This article is talking specifically about the ways in which it is detrimental to be a tradeswoman. So in this context, being a woman makes it more difficult for this person to their job.
Looking at another example of something that would make being a tradesperson difficult: Would you call it harassment if customers were consistently making flippant remarks about a co-worker that was missing a hand?
> It sounds like from your perspective, being better looking than their co-workers is a good thing. By and large, men are going to find women better looking than other men. That means the "better looking" comment is directly pointing out that the recipient of the comment is a woman.
It is hard to be funny without referring to anything about the current situation.
The other perspective on this is Women put a lot of care into how they look. Men don't. Admiration for your best qualities is a gesture of friendship. Same goes with those who are young and energetic. Statements like "pretty boy" is a compliment and adoration. Or statements like "big guy" or "general" for old and experienced.
I often wonder what my life would be like if I'd been told as a child that I would face discrimination. Would I attribute every failure, rejection, misfortune, and unfair treatment to systematic discrimination? I think I probably would.
> If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.
Especially seen that people pushing for this to be considered harassment are the exact same demographic closing their eyes when it's pointed to them that number of actual rapes are going through the roof in Europe.
White men joking about a woman looking good: harassment. White women getting raped: eyes closed, don't want to hear about it.
And of course the overlap between polite people complimenting women that they're good looking and actual rapists is approximately zero.
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…
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.
This was my experience exactly working on a welding crew when I was 19. We worked 12s 6AM-6PM (or 6PM-6AM if on a night shift) and often worked longer. The longest shift I worked was nearly 20hr, which was great because every hour past 8hr was worth 1.5x.
"Safety" was "watch the fuck out and don't get hurt." I didn't have access to a respirator even if I had known enough to want one.
I did have enough sense to listen to the old guys who said your body can't take that kind of work for more than about 15yr without starting to break down, and that I should go to engineering school instead.
There was one (1) female welder that crew of at least 20 and she put up with a ton of overtly horrible stuff. She was also incredibly good at welding, I saw her once burn an entire 7018 rod without looking, no helmet, just by feel, and the slag came off in one piece.
I'm suggesting that the "inuendos from both" is the wrong analysis and that the workplace issue would be the sexualization of the product name being used as a tool to harass women (there would probably also be comments made to men, but harassment would predominantly be towards women).
Context matters. In a 95% male profession, making hostile comments about women is absolutely more of an issue than similar comments about men. And vice versa in a predominantly female profession.
Please use PPE. My dad and grandfather were both mechanics (not welders, but adjacent) and both contracted very similar bladder cancers most likely from skin exposure to a particular solvent bath chemical.
There is no reward for macho or risky behavior, only a painful/miserable death and shorter life, and less time with family. So many male members of my mom's extended family died early from tobacco use and from industrial and agricultural hazards.
That means breathing fumes, unknown substances, or fine dust without a respirator (or smoking), not using gloves while handling chemicals/coatings/etc., or putting oneself in mechanically risky situations.
TL;DR: Just use PPE.
They cost money, they're a hassle, they're not fashionable, their benefit isn't immediately obvious but so is a seatbelt until there's a known problem like DDT, asbestos, tetraethyllead lead, dirt particulates, or fiberglass.
I only weld at the edge of my garage, with the door open, with a fan running, and while wearing a respirator. Thanks for looking out for me and others.
I wear a 3M 7502 half face respirator behind my 3M Speedglas autodark mask and it fits just fine. A proper integrated system would be nicer but this setup is safe and works for 1/10th the price. Also if it's not too hot and humid I can leave safety glasses on which is convenient for grinding--just flip up the visor and go for it, no safety squints needed.
Women face higher consequences for pregnancy so you would expect attitudes towards sexual suggestion to be different. Also, when you're talking about a group where the gender ratio is like 20:1 the woman is going to be the butt of a disproportionate number of the jokes.
> 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…
Makes sense. I suppose if women had invented these things, they would have been able to name them something nicer.
> I’m resentful of these silent evaluations, particularly when I’m learning something new and trying to keep all my fingers.
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.
> Stoicism is a workaround to credibility.
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.
> The pontificating metal-shop customer should be, too.
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.
It all seems like the right idea for the wrong reasons and so the interpretation is heavily compromised by it.
Yeah, my overall reaction was kinda "Welcome to being a dude. You get shit on mercilessly until you prove otherwise. You get told to shut the fuck up and knock it out even if you're tired after 4 hours. You have to look out for yourself because nobody else is going to. God help you if you're a tiny or effeminate guy. etc."
Blue collar work sucks ass. You generally only do it because you don't have any better options.
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.
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.
And one thing they certainly need is welders. And they're training.
The opening video even has a female welder in it.
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".
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".
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?
She is in good company. Everyone thinks most other people are incompetent. Find the best welder you can, film them doing their thing, post it on the Internet. Watch the comments flood in with scathing criticism for how they're doing it wrong.
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.
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.
The comments you're complaining about appear to be men describing, from their own experiences as men, what it's like to be a man.
If you're going to imply that one needs to be a woman to understand the female perspective on these social encounters, you could at least be consistent and fair about it. As much as you might tire of seeing discussions like the current one, I tire of the insinuation - across so many discussions I've found myself stuck in across the Internet - that women have some special insight into womanhood, and also some special insight into manhood.
Just as I tire of being urged to have empathy for people unlike myself, then shouted at when my empathy leads me to the "wrong" conclusions, or told that actually having such empathy is impossible on account of my whatever immutable characteristics.
> Are there actually any women in this conversation?
I think the average demographic here is the standard software engineering team in the US, unfortunately. I hope I'm wrong. There are some high profile HN'ers that are women (e.g. DoreenMichele comes to mind).
Fun fact: in eastern Europe (and Russia too?) the gender dynamics of software engineering are much more gender equal compared to the US/EU. Probably other STEM disciplines as well. I'm not sure about welding though.
I'm getting a bit side tracked with my thoughts, it's just that I think it ties into bigger issues.
I remember once being in a feminism class, as the only male, making a case for getting women into stem and it fell on deaf ears. I think that's also in part because women (and men for that matter) that take feminism classes tend to skew liberal artsy. I just happen to have a liberal artsy side and a STEM side (and a cool feminism teacher that was patient enough for all my naive questions so I felt emotionally safe to take her class).
I wish there were more women in the conversation but unfortunately there aren't. The last company I worked for happened to have an equal 50/50 gender split. That was cool. It confirmed what I thought about men and women: ignore gender and focus on personality and their thoughts. I've often been in situations where any form of stereotypes have been thrown out of the window and my last employer was one of them. It's beautiful.
Unfortunately, HN seems to be too big for that. The culture needs to shift and I don't have much of a clue how. I think in part it's with how women versus men are socialized here. Boys that are socially excluded tend to go towards computers. Girls don't really seem to be socially excluded that often compared to boys? Just brainstorming, I might be totally off.
> 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.
I'm curious how you find them frustrating. When I was reading them, I wasn't quite sure what to think about it.
By the way, I've used a throwaway because of my submission to HN, not because of this comment. I thought I was on my pseudonym account. I have autism (diagnosed in my mid thirties) and I think many people here are on the spectrum, which is what my submission is about.
> I think in part it's with how women versus men are socialized here.
Indeed. Women are socialized to seek men of higher status as a partner. Thus men feel the need to seek higher status to become an attractive mate. And so men "infiltrate" any position that offers a chance at higher status (at least where high pay stands in as a proxy). Likewise, men are socialized to seek women with beauty rather than status, so there is little imperative for women to seek professions of status, but do benefit from careers that will preserve their beauty – so something like welding in a harsh environment that is hard on one's health is not a top choice.
That said, the social norms do seem to be changing. It appears the younger generations aren't coupling up so much anymore, and if that trend continues attracting a mate may no longer be a consideration.
>I think the average demographic here is the standard software engineering team in the US, unfortunately
I think this would be extremely generous to the demographic here. Women get paid for their time and get to solve problems they might be interested in at work, so it makes sense for them to want to be there. Women do not get paid to be condescended towards on a tech bro website like hacker news.
Even if women might read the front page, I do not know why they would want to participate in the conversation on this site, honestly. It is hard to articulate the totality of the issue to someone who participates and does not see it. This community *is* obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
I'm female and I've been here, on and off, since Hacker News was founded. (I burn accounts every so often so I don't get attached to them.)
I participate for a few reasons:
1.) I'm a 3rd generation techie and that's a fairly rare perspective, particularly for people of my age group (I'm 36). HN is one of the few places online that can appreciate that nuance and why it might matter. Related to this, I'm a woman who can in no way be considered an interloper or someone who doesn't understand the culture or the professions. I'm basically here to offer the perspective that the average HN user might hear from his daughter in 10-30 years when I opine on gender stuff.
2.) It's one of the few places with a decent age spread amongst users. Too many other sites are dominated by people under the age of 30 (to be generous).
3.) It's text based and amenable to long format textual discussions, which are how I prefer to interact online since I joined the WWW in 1993 and grew up with the text based Web.
4.) It's somewhere online where a good chunk of the userbase is more technologically proficient than I am and I like talking to people who know more than me about esoteric subjects.
It's totally okay if you don't want to go into a nuanced discussion. I guess I'm just bored and curious. Overall, I find your comment interesting.
> a tech bro website like hacker news
HN doesn't feel like that to me. Whenever I'm here, I have my brainstorm and science hat on. Nothing more, nothing less. To call HN a tech bro site, it seems to be a bit of an attack and not conductive towards the discussion. I guess the definition of tech bro differs. Also, being a male that doesn't care too much about its own gender, I am probably "well-suited" to not care.
In my case, I draw the line if they're also into sports (like going to a soccer match or something). Probably others don't. But that's why I have a bit of an issue with words like "tech bros". Like, do tech bros even lift? Most don't seem to. The characterization is too vague.
> Women do not get paid to be condescended towards
That makes sense, and I can imagine how it is experienced as such. It's sad to see.
I remember being on a subreddit once and experiencing it the other way (r/womenover30 or something). When I said something I was downvoted. If a woman said the same thing, she wasn't. I can imagine some women feel that a bit here. Perhaps a lot, but my imagination fails there. I get that it sucks.
> This community is obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
What does it mean to be obnoxiously male? I've seen so many different ideas on what it means to be male that I honestly stopped giving a shit about what people mean. It's too confusing, despite me being a hetero cis white male.
I guess it's the autism. Whenever it comes to gender (masculinity and femininity) I mostly see rhetorical nonsense (e.g. some people saying that being emotional sensitive is a feminine quality. It is most likely true that more women are like that, but I just find that whole frame of thinking toxic as the word "femininity" almost implies it's inherent, which I think is highly debatable - I can go on like that for a while, also about masculinity). Could you be a bit more factual so I can make my own conclusions?
I mean, I've been to a feminism class and while that was really useful, I still think the typology is silly.
---
That it is seen as condenscending, that depends. With regards to condescending on women in this thread, I see that. I've also seen it to some extent in other threads. But condescending in general? No. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but you write a little hand wavy at times. I mean, the points you make still stand, but I think they'd stand better without the labeling things so strongly that are clearly a strong interpretation that I don't understand how you get to it.
I do get the general vibe of the average Hacker News person when the subject is about dating. Comments tend to steer towards hopelessness, and that particular way of being I found is strongly correlated with being out of touch with how women look at certain things. I get the sense when women write something the average HN commenter has an issue to not look past their own trauma in order to listen to what women are saying. In that sense, I can see it's off putting.
I really believe that you are approaching this in good faith, so I will do the same. I don't have time to really dig into this deeply with you so these brief justifications of my stance will have to suffice. I don't understand some of your tangents, and you will have to forgive me for not addressing the reddit or sports stuff.
> Re: tech bro
The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of "founders". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking.
The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro "thing". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY
> Re: obnoxiously male
This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comment sections on HN, but let's just talk about this comment section.
Commenters here are confidently asserting that the author's lived experience is wrong because of a certain interpretation of the words that they typed in the article. When she says that someone made comments that made her feel othered, the reaction here is to disbelieve and downplay. That is very much a "obnoxiously male" way of approaching things. In more balanced spaces, the presumption would be that this blog post was made for a reason and that the person who made it is valid and rational by default. Nobody here has any additional information, and they are asserting that their interpretation of her words is correct even though they are heavily influenced by their own biases of gender, class, and otherwise.
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.
I don't know about serial killers, normally they are in prison if known. But felons, yes definitely. A criminal record is not disqualifying in most trades and unions.
Seconded. Hiring Machinists at work we went through a few ex cons and wound up hiring one for a few years which turned out to be a nightmare. Now we have a hippy in a band who makes inappropriate comments. You cant win.
> The man in the audience at the academic conference who wants to lecture rather than ask a question...
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.
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 ...".
He felt put down and he'd have done exactly same had she been a man.
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.
I agree some of this is class warfare not gender warfare.
Liked the article. Odd to say that of a sad observation of life's iniquities, but it's a good article I think.
All that I can add of value is summed up in the phrase "Sweet hood, you go girl!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 'comparing me to my co-worker: “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.”'
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...
> 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.
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.
Perhaps I'm picturing the situation wrong, but why wouldn't it work on the precision levels of a tape measure?
The most obvious reason is if your blade isn't 1/8 inch (3.17mm) thick.
If you're cutting with a bandsaw - the blade is a lot thinner than that.
And if cutting with a circular saw, the cutting teeth are wider than the main disk of the saw, which complicates matters - and I can't imagine it'd be easy to keep the tape measure hooked on either.
And of course - subtract 1/8 inch? Are you sure you don't mean add 1/8 inch? If you're learning a clever new technique, better to practice on some scrap, not do it on a customer's material while they're watching :)
At the higher level, saws have no undo function. Cut an expensive bit of metal too short? Someone has to pay $$$ for new material. Buddy on another machine did a load of work on the part before you cut it too short? He's going to have to redo it all. Who'll pay for his time? The stock you cut too short was on a long lead-time or urgent project? You just fucked up the schedule.
So if a machinist is doing some work for you and they want to measure twice and cut once - they're doing you a favour :)
The request may have been to take a 24 foot segment and cut it into equal nearly 8 foot segments. Measuring all at once lets you avoid the last piece being notably shorter.
she may be implying a lack of precision from the floating tip on a well used/worn measuring tape. i wouldn't rely on that for anything i considered "precise". framing a house? sure.
Fun fact: the floating tip on a measuring tape is loose by design. It's to account for the width of the tip itself when you're measuring by pushing the tip into a corner, versus measuring by hooking the tip around the edge of your material.
So a "loose" tip on a measuring tape is actually more accurate than a fixed rigid tip that does not move. (though I don't think I've ever seen a tape measure that is lacking this feature)
I don’t know specifically, but If your saw has a stop or something that’s going to be better than repeated tape measure measurements. Also assumes that the saw blade is actually 1/8 of an inch.
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.
Welders don't really like their plastic testicles.
Best guess is the tolerance required for the pipe length was tighter than you can reliably get going off of a tape measure foot (which are often loose, worn, bent, etc. and not a reliable starting/zero point for precision measurement).
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.
It is annoying to be generally in support of diversity but then you get a case comes where someone is claiming discrimination and it turns out they just suck at their job. This sort of thing is just ammunition for the "dumb, barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" crowd.
I admit it, I enjoy the FB videos for comments like this. It is hilarious. It never matters a bit whether the target is a good welder or not, guarantee a raft of people will swing by and tell them they suck.
They're not the worst welds I've ever seen but they're very good either. I would be embarrassed if those were my welds and I wouldn't take a welder with such welds seriously regardless of their gender. The quality is on the level of pretty low end job-shop. I wouldn't care about the bed slats but it would be hard for me to ignore the bad welds on anything regularly visible.
Making welds look good is more than just appearance, the appearance tells a story about how the weld was developed, how the temperature was controlled, how deep the penetration, porosity etc. It's easier to do this than do a post weld validation of weld integrity. TIG welding requires a lot of skill and is not like using a glue gun.
Laser welding on the other hand is much easier. Instead of making the large investment in time to learn how to TIG weld property she could just skip it and go direct to laser.
weld prettiness != weld goodness. I am not saying she is god's gift to welding, but without actual testing, a cross section, and xray, you cannot judge accurately.
This is why safety critical welds are xray inspected, checked for cracks, etc. Not clear if her diploma included some certs, but those typically will include a bend test and/or xray.
Not every weld has to be pretty. The ugly aluminum welds look plenty strong and are not normally visible. Welds like that can take 1/10th the time of pretty welds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Like other tradeswomen, I’ve learned to work around unwanted comments, including uninvited conversations with men bent on signaling their expertise.
It's obvious why an uninvited conversations are perceived as a sexism.
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.
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 could 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 sexist asshole but just being an asshole.
As the other comment rightfully notes, any difference is going to be a target.
Yeah, same here. Even if I know what I am doing, sometime I learn something new or a new way to approach something. Sometimes not. But then hey, free advice is worth what you paid for it.
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.
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.
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.
It's not computing related, but welding is (or can be) quite a technical field, requiring years of education and experience, particulary welding exotic materials or in critical applications such as nuclear reactors. It's not all muffler shop work.
> And more discussion around these issues is more likely to lead to positive outcomes than ignoring them.
Sometimes I wonder.
The left spends a lot of time pointing out that the right is bigoted, and the right just shrugs, because so what? These two groups disagree on whether there is a problem.
Because we are evolved, embodied beings interacting with other embodied beings. We are not disembodied atomistic work units compelled to follow social norms invented by maladjusted corporate "ethicists".
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!
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!
Took the worn parts to a Chevy parts department -- they enjoyed helping a teenager do it yourself, first time.
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!).
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 bending bar 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 ..."!
Shocks were part of the upper A-frame pivots and poor. At a parts shop, got two piston 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!
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.
> 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
Is this really harassment? It sounds kinda humorous or complimentary. Author seems to have no sense of humour.
While one person saying this once is not necessarily harassment, the frame of reference has to be from the context of the recipient. Consider how often the author has to hear this or similar comments from customers as a result of being a woman working in a trade.
I'm not the author, but there are a lot of motivations one could have. The less people are constrained by stereotypes and hostility, the more they can do what they want to do, the more likely they are to be able to make a living, the less they will be beset with self-doubt, the less they will be dominated and abused by others who have more opportunities. It's about freedom. Why shouldn't women be free to be welders if they want to be?
The more women are welders, the weaker the social constraints become against women being welders; or things like welders, because the stereotypes we're talking about aren't generally so narrow.
Women aren't a special case. Lots of people are hemmed in by stereotypes and biases. Why shouldn't they be free? Well, people who get the opportunities others are fenced out of do benefit from the biases, but that's not a noble motivation.
If you want to look at hidden GDP women and access to power tools is probably a big one.
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.
We have gone from upkeep at home to asset building.
Some of this will go to careers, but it's not that simple.
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.
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%
> A near miss is often about reaction times and strength.
Funny, I thought it was about safety procedures and culture. Leaving accident avoidance up to reflexes is an incredibly poor way to build anything safely right?
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.
> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
IDK, I think it's to enforce pecking orders based on stuff you can't at all help. I grew up working class and hated it--it's essentially bullying, no matter how you look at it.
It's one thing to make lighthearted jokes about some stuff you did, like "remember the time you forgot to base64 decode the images and stored garbage in the DB". It's entirely another to bully people for who and what they are. You're basically daring people to get somehow violent with you to get you to stop, and besides that being dangerous, a lot of people would rather not. It also creates this dynamic where people willing to be violent avoid bullying and rise ok the pecking order, and those who aren't don't.
On my way to a "white collar" job, I worked construction. It was stage building, which is the kind of construction that "blue collar" workers routinely laughed at, but it was still hard, physical work.
How did I get my promotion that made the job worthwhile? A person fell 30 feet onto concrete. The next week, I was replacing him, with all of the risks he had, and the potential outcome.
That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away).
People claim "simple" when they mean "my way". People claim lack of "knowing how to use the language" when the wrong ideas get injected into a language (I'm personally looking at you Perl, but now that I'm working Golang, it's starting to feel too familiar).
The truth is, there is often more than one way to solve a problem, but an strong willed person won't see it that way. I've walked away from plenty of marginally (and I mean marginally) better solutions just to compromise to some form of a solution than I care to enumerate. One can't win such arguments.
I agree, it's not malicious, but is is egotistical. I've even won solutions where I said "Let's all agree that you're right, and then let's accept the code as-is." This industry is improved compared to decades before, but it's not yet fully rational, or even fair.
That said, all of the chiding and sideways comments I received in the construction field didn't amount to half of the comments I received as a developer. There is something toxic about our field that we don't want to focus on (and I can't blame those that look away).
As a programmer, I've worked in places and with people who were straight-up sociopathically abusive and I've worked with people who were absolutely respectful and reasonable and groups that were in-between. The co-workers, the boss, the company and location's culture all went into this.
Thing about this is - since it is variable, since it is not necessary, there's no excuse for it as a natural thing, in any industry. Also, while sometimes it's the result just dysfunction (the "tolerant" boss who tolerates psycho team lead) but often it's a strategy for extracting more work for people (at Intel, for example).
A lot of the specifics mentioned in the article aren't specific to her being a woman. Many guys just talk about things differently; they will banter about themselves and how any lady is easier on the eyes then any man. That's not sexism; that's just reality of what a guy thinks and banters about. And an average guy is stronger then the average girl; that's biology. Most guys don't care what sex you are, so long as you can do the work, don't complain much, and can afford banter to make the day go by faster.
The one that got me was the comment about a customer looking past her at a co-worker, even though she was older than he was, and "for all they know, more experienced". But, she's not actually more experienced, she's new at the job, which might have been evident (this detail is left out). Anyway, judging someone's competence based on their age, which she expected them to do, is hardly better than doing it based on their sex.
If the customer was trying to guess which of two people in front of them might be a welder, and only 5% of welders are female, it's not irrational to assume that it's the man. The customer may never have seen a female welder before. Until they say something like you can't be a welder, you're a woman, I think the generous reading would be that the customer is having their priors updated in real time, not necessarily that they're a misogynist.
I thought similar. Anyone moving from an office environment to one of physical work is going to struggle both with the physical challenges and the workplace culture. Trippily so coming from academia!
As someone who started their career in an office environment, then went to grunt work, and now back in an office and a remote WFH job. I don't think it would be a struggle. Would it be different? Of course... physical labor is the complete opposite of office work. Would it be harder than sitting in a chair pressing buttons?... sure. But it wouldn't be a struggle. It would be more of a struggle working with people that don't understand what context is or what nuances are.
It's not the work or the culture, it's the people. The type that would call you a vagina for wanting water on a hot day to avoid dehydration. Or the boss that will tell you "you think too much" when you come to them with an idea that increases productivity. But ya, the work or culture would be a piece of cake to navigate. For me, often time it's the idiots you have to work with that usually make a place a shit place to work.
The "physical work workplace culture" fits me much better: more fun, less stringent, less talking behind someones back because maybe he/she made a non-PC remark, no one will go cry to HR for a remark you made that was not even about them personally...
It's not a struggle is a relief!
I don’t miss many things from my last blue collar job, but it was so much more relaxed. My coworkers all felt much more “real”. Too bad the pay wasn’t there, or I’d still be doing it.
>less talking behind someones back because maybe he/she made a non-PC remark
it's still a workplace. There will always be people talking behind others' backs
What comes across from the article to me is the class barrier more than the gender one...
I read the article. There is zero indications anywhere in the article that this is the case, none.
Notably, the authors describes both her experience and the experience of other women. And they don't like but they expect and let it roll off their backs.
Sure, some work places have culture of "good-natured razzing" but others have a culture of straight-bullying. Sometimes the bullying comes from people who are damaged themselves and other times it comes from a company or a manager who believes this lets them control their workers (not always incorrectly). Either the bullying doesn't serve the workers.
But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
A second of thought should show this kind of generalization is impossible. You're engaged in the classic "I know the working class and they are exactly this way" sophistry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What did you find exhausting, specifically? Just trying to understand your comment.
Not GP, but I've made similar transitions:
> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target.
Can be exhausting. You have to either join in, be a target, or both.
I've found that the shop talk communities end up with stronger bonds and generally more real friendships vs office friendships which are very weak.
It makes me think it's a somewhat innate way to foster relationships. It definitely seems to break down walls. I've come to learn that the more a group roasts you the more they like you.
This is an idea that is promoted by the media. Occasionally it is true.
After eight years of working in the military, it only took two years before I never heard from another member of my unit. Within the first three months of leaving, only one person kept in touch (for the two years). When they moved out-of-state, I never heard from them either.
Don't underestimate the perception of what happens with what is likely to happen. I don't think it differs much between "the shop" and "the office" having worked in both. How many people do you talk to on a weekly basis from your last company?
I kind of agree...
My strongest lifelong work friends definitely came from grad school where none of that happened. Or from research work where it didn't either. But there it was pressure and performance and cooperation that helped. It breeds trust.
In blue collar work, esp team oriented which it often is, I'm not sure it's the shop talk or the team/trust environment. Either way i felt the same bond to people making pizza 5 busy nights in a row as I did late night coding sprints while pair programming, or contorting under the steel hull of a target boat to reach a bad CPU while my colleague watched the terminal while seasick and we are both drinking diesel funes.
It's about shared trust I think. The level of casualness of shop talk is just an indicator and kind of a stress test of bonds.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. It's something about the level of pressure but a lot of us software guys have pressure but don't get the same relationships blue collar workers get. I've done both industries (industrial construction and programming), and I definitely found it much easier to make lasting friendships in the construction one even though I experienced similar pressures
It's something to do with the casualness or gruffness of it that makes it better. Office environments are so sterile. Maybe it's the lack of HR. lol
Also it's easier to talk, and you're constantly moving around. Focus is paramount in SWeng, which is the same as "leave me alone".
Bonds forged in fire are stronger - this has been known since Rome needed soldiers. Bootcamp doesn't require sleep deprivation, adversarial leadership,and that level of physical strain, but shared suffering increases unit cohesion.
I choose less suffering at my work, I can choose my friends from other circles, thank you very much.
It REALLY depends. There's as many factors in if you are being ribbed or bullied as there are in friendships. YMMV immensely.
But yes, the best way to bond has often been by putting down others.
So can "corporate talk" at a white collar job. There are days where I want to vomit after hearing about "stakeholders", "action items", and "alignment". I'd prefer crude jokes to that, even if they were directed at me.
It's a little different when people are regularly talking about your genitals or sexual preferences or histories or your family reputation. And in public. And in team meetings.
That kind of thing rarely comes up in corporate america. In corp/academia people just like to imply you're lazy or unintelligent, subtly and frequently. But yeah, white collar jobs are annoying as well. That's why we all get paid to do them.
I think everyone else is assuming a different level and amount of personal insults when we discuss “shop talk”.
Because I've heard different levels and amounts of insults. It can just be some harmless dad jokes and softball stuff you'd hear in white collar work. It can just be outright sexual harassment. It depends so much on your environment that it's hard to pin down a universal "standard" .
>But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
I realize I made a throw away account just to post this, but try reflecting shop talk back to white men with white stereotypes
They often can't take the shit they give out. You won't know who's-who until you get undermined behind your back and they start fucking with your work
The insecure ones blend in with the ones who can actually take the shit they give and it's the collective support of giving shit to non-white men in the trades that's the problem
It's high school bullies trying to present as it being all in good fun when it rarely is
It's never in fun. I don't mind a good razzing. But when it's constant or every day or you're the only one razzed because people like laughing at your no nonsense attitude when you get riled up at their stupidity it's like living in a courtroom of idiocracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfifauG93ZU
Certainly not limited to white men
Well there is this though:
> Women in trades have reported encounters with customers who doubted their competence and who refused to deal with them, seeking a man instead.
There is plenty of low key sexism (and racism) like that among white collars too so it is not restricted to trades (as acknowledged by the article's author), but this goes beyond banter like just teasing someone because they have red hair.
I think GP is right though.
Real sexism is way more present among middle-class/white-collar workers (whatever their gender is) than between blue collar workers. You will have poorly worded jokes from your coworkers, but the ass-grab or demeaning remarks will always be from managers (the kind of manager who don't know the trade or inherited the job) or customers.
See, I kind of agree that there are certain types of sexism like assumptions that women won't get their hands dirty or patronising artificial politeness that are purely middle class constructs.
But the idea that only white collar workers are capable of ass-grabs or genuinely derogatory remarks is wild...
He claimed “more prevalent” not “only white collar does x”
He also claimed the ass-grabs and demeaning remarks will "always" be from managers [without trade experience]. Which is wild.
It is only when someone think they have power over someone else that they allow themselves to be inappropriate on the workplace. My mom was a nurse before forming nurses, and lived through that (from doctors especially). Her best friend was a security guard at diverse places, but she started at a mall (where she has "wild" stories as you put it. Confirmed 100% always her manager or customers, once the day manager was put on ice for harassment, his replacement ended the night by touching her butt the day he arrived. Crazy that people do that).
But even closer to me, and more recently: i know a woman who work in a call center, and she explained to me the reason why it's always managers on the workplace: the other don't have the time to play powergames with each other, they have too much work (for her it was a female manager who learned of her homosexuality who started to get touchy).
I stand by that. Obviously it is different in non-work settings, but at work?
My guess would be that it's less about "position of power" and more about "less likely to face consequences". You see the same type of behavior in a variety of cases
- Construction workers hooting and whistling at women
- Gamers online being horrible to _everyone_
- Managers (as noted) sexually harassing employees
All cases were consequences for behaving badly are far less likely.
What is power, if not the ability to do what you want without facing consequences? If other people already support you or are indifferent, no power is needed to do what you want.
> It is only when someone think they have power over someone
Isn’t that kind of the point though? That the racist and the sexist and the queerbasher think they have power over the group they’re bigoted against - and that’s what lends them the confidence to act mean?
Yeah that's normal, like we short fat guys are never popular with girls. Learnt that from teenages and firmly believe that biologically people look down on each other.
societally. what amounts to attractiveness can vary a lot more than you think throughout cultures and times.
But yes, people have always been in competition biologically to flaunt success and pick the best mating partner. You can do that through putting others down or otherwise controlling a mate. And the dimorphic needs between sexes only intensifies this. I'm no sociologist but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a universal experience.
> But is it malicious? Almost certainly not.
Honestly, it often will be malicious, or will quickly become malicious if you don't take it graciously. And why should you? It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
> It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons
This probably seems obviously true to you but it should not. Some people think there's a reasonable amount of banter, sometimes at the expense of another acquaintance, before it becomes bullying or unacceptable in the workplace.
Without wanting to indulge too much in macho tropes: A welding shop is inherently dangerous. If you spend long enough in one, you are going to get seriously injured at some point. You are going to be the first responder when someone else gets seriously injured. Surviving in that environment requires a certain level of toughness. I'm not defending bullying, but some places aren't supposed to be welcoming.
I worked construction for a few years after high school and the only injuries I received on the job was from bullying/hazing (minor, but still). Never mind the stupid shit they did that could have hurt someone, but luckily didn't.
People who work dangerous jobs can get pretty callous about it. I saw people doing dangerous shit constantly. And the people with permanent injuries end up using gallows humor to cope.
I just looked it up. Welding is definitely not a safe profession, but it seems like severe injury rates is around 3.5 per hundred workers throughout a whole career. Definitely not "most". And about the same or slightly less than carpentry (4 per hundred), which from personal experience is a profession filled with decent and friendly people.
There's a lot of potential for petty injuries that'll be a nuisance for weeks to months. Minor burns, slightly smashed fingers or hands, some real good cuts, etc. Not a lot of potential for serious injury though above the baseline of your environment (i.e. air conditioned shop vs muddy trench)
It's not so much accidents as the lifetime occupational exposure. Metal fumes are nasty.
I did a couple of years at the NASSCO shipyard in San Diego as a welder after the first .com crash.
The (literal) toxic work environment is why I left welding, even though I genuinely enjoyed the work. But I was already starting to see real changes in my health, even though I was super careful about respirator use, etc. What really sealed the deal was learning that my shift lead, who I thought was a good decade older than me, was actually a few years younger, but had just been welding longer, with the body damage to show for it.
Yea, that’s one thing that really stood out to me when I did a 2 year mechanical engineering program - mostly training to be a cad jockey. Some of my teachers looked waaay older than they should have, and the welding instructor was the worst.
Now think of how many guys there are out there doing it with no repository protection and the good ‘ole safety squints.
There is no way that is correct. What data are you using? [https://www.bls.gov/iif/fatal-injuries-tables/fatal-occupati...]
BLS is combining solder/brazing with welding. And has no concept of industrial vs fab, etc.
You are conflating serious injury with fatalities.
That sheet is fatalities. It’s literally in the URL and at the top of the page. See column ‘Total fatal injuries’.
Right. But the post you are refuting is talking about "serious injuries" not "fatalities".
they were claiming numbers an order of magnitude less than fatalities.
Per hundred workers. Your link is in absolute units of fatalities, their claim is a rate. At the very least, you need the number of workers (which is also available in BLS data) to refute their claim.
The data shows roughly 454k workers in the welders, solderers, and brazers occupation series. With their claim of 3.5 severe injuries per 100 worker-careers, that's about 16k severe injuries. If you assume an average career is about 25 years, that's about 636 severe injuries per year, compared to the 48 fatalities per year. So it's an order of magnitude higher (which I think is the direction most people would expect).
thanks for tracking that down! I stand corrected.
The main factor driving safety is experience. I suspect shop talk does indeed correlate, but I think it's a mistake to assume causation. Put differently, the number of angry words thrown around being a major contributing factor to an accident response strains belief. It's experience.
Eh, the way to actually be safe—not just feel safe—is not to be macho and tough but to be uncompromisingly professional.
Why would the risk of either being injured or treating injury require you to be the target of bullying or a bully?
Wouldn’t it be in your best interest to be kind and supportive to one another in such a dangerous / difficult environment? That way everyone is happy and confident and focuses on the stresses of the job, not the stress of being bullied or being cajoled into bullying for the sake of conformity?
What you’re describing sounds like it really only appeals to a certain kind of person, and I don’t understand how that kind of person makes a better welder.
On some level, you're describing a difference between traditional male bonding (joking and "razzing") and traditional female bonding (being kind and supportive). Both of these can be positive and both can be toxic - bullying is an obvious case, but just ask anyone who has been in a supposedly "supportive" environment filled with backstabbing and gossip how nice that is.
I don't know why there's a need to define either of these as inferior and wrong - isn't the point of diversity to allow people from different backgrounds to take different approaches?
To me, personally, the "kind, supportive" style often comes off as insincere. It's actually a barrier to me trusting someone. But I don't know, maybe that's just me.
What on earth? Yeah, if I work in a dangerous profession, I want my coworkers to be people I trust, not people who bully me because I stand out. Honestly, if it's a dangerous workplace, shouldn't we be looking out for each other instead of making casually sexist comments at the only woman in the shop?
It’s not just fun, but the least offensive way of establishing hierarchy, which is required to form a group, in men. They ask you who you are. A reference to some rule (e.g. what’s acceptable) is by definition a confrontation. A refusal to position yourself in a group, which is tested/offered by poking a person, makes you a questionable element in it. Yes, all this is mostly pointless in a modern life. But that’s how an average hunting-age male works.
The attributes and reasons do not matter in isolation. They will find where to poke even if you’re a twin of one of the group members. Red hair is just the obvious one to use.
The alternative is going to the office, filtering thoughts in your mouth and reporting slight misspeaks and inappropriately timed eye contacts to a special manager who then decides who’s higher in hierarchy according to some rules.
> It's not acceptable to make fun of people
Is that not down to the culture? I found some of the warmest workplaces were also the places were everyone was constantly shitting on each other and not taking it too serious. I'd not say it was bullying, as everyone got a piece. There was a certain toughness to it, but at the same time everyone was caring deeply for one another.
If the target of your joke isn't laughing (if they're upset by it), then it's not a joke, it's bullying. If they _are_ laughing/enjoying it, then it's playful banter. You're right, it very much varies by culture (culture here being as specific as "the specific group of people")
Spent a lot of time in hunting and fishing parties with near constant teasing and in those situations its usually the rudest and most egotistical jerk who doesnt laugh and enjoy. They cross the line repeatedly, everyone takes it in good nature while internally counting the incidents, then eventually someone takes them down a peg and they act like a child.
In a culture where banter is accepted, sometimes someone will be upset by something.
I think the current tendency to prevent all possibility to upsetting behaviour is overshooting the mark.
Against bullying is a good movement.
Against all possibly upsetting remarks is basically being against banter and killing a part of what makes us human. I hope that free speech remains allowed and to some extend "uncancelable".
>It's not acceptable to make fun of people for being skinny, ginger, shy, black, white, female, or any other things that the in group considers non-standard for whatever weird reasons.
How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.
Dudes in dangerous professions bond by calling each other slurs which is ok because they're all in on it, such that if you can't handle some bad words how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs, so you're either not cut out for the job.
You as an outsider from the nice people bubble don't have a say in this to lecture them since you're not in on it.
> How about let people say and do whatever they want amongst themselves and stay out of their conversations.
Sounds like a great way of excluding people from the workforce.
Sounds like an opportunity for any of the wealthy left-leaning people to start a competitor and seize market share by hiring those traditional companies consider undesirable.
Great at excluding snowflakes which is what you want in those dangerous professions. If you get pissy that someone called you ginger, you're clearly not cut for any demanding and dangerous job. Better stay in your sanitized white collar safe space while you tweet how the world is mean.
Check out professions by suicide rates https://www.registerednursing.org/articles/suicide-rates-pro...
Apparently a lot of construction, extraction installation, maintenance and repair folk have a very bad time of i. Perhaps if they could get decent support in the work place that wouldn't happen. Though I suppose you'd probably conclude it's just natural attrition as the snowflakes kill themselves.
"how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs"
Some dickhead flinging racial slurs at me all day doesn't make me feel that they have my back. Quite the opposite, actually.
Have you ever attended a mandatory DEI meeting? The entire premise of that industry is to tell you which slurs are acceptable (ie: cisgender ) and which are not.
"Cisgender" is a slur the same way "male", "heterosexual", and "white" are (I am all three; four, including cisgender). In other words, it is not a slur.
Slur isn't an intrinsic property of a word: it's a property of how it's used. "Male" can be a slur, as can "heterosexual", or "management". In theory, "cisgender" can also be a slur, though I've never heard such a use. (You'll sometimes hear "cissy", but I've never heard that used against a specific person.)
You might argue that "punching up" is acceptable, or even that it's not slurring by definition (which I'd dispute), but membership of one "privileged class" doesn't automatically translate to actual privilege. (I think the feminists call this intersectionality.) In such a context, the labels of "privileged classes" absolutely can be used to punch down (e.g. saying "you're such a man" and slamming the door in the face of an impoverished gay transgender man trying to access domestic abuse services).
The usage of the word "slur" in question -- it has to be this if it's on a list one can learn from DEI consultants -- is
It is inherent in the term itself, not in its use.* So it isn't simply anything that can be understood as an insult. All the stuff about "punching up" and so forth is beside the point."cisgender" has a technical meaning which is still it's primary use: someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth (so it can apply to intersex people as well). In this it is like "heterosexual" and "male". Arguably it is not like "white", in that who counts as white is malleable, but for the most part whatever it is, in most contexts, "white" is not a slur either.
* I am in fact a lapsed linguist. I have a PhD. My specialization was in semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is meaning encoded in language. Pragmatics is meaning inferred from use: "it's cold in here" meaning "shut the window", for example. I am aware that one can talk more precisely and at much, much greater length about all of this. But this is Hacker News, so this is all I am going to say.
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What does any of this have to do with what they said? There's a difference between an in-group privately calling each other whatever and said in-group directing it towards someone not part of said group.
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If you have this attitude, you aren't cut out to work in the trades
The trades need to change then. What you and others are so blithely defending in this thread is textbook toxic behavior.
What exactly is your plan to achieve this "needed" change?
> if you don't take it graciously.
That is the point of the banter: to see how you handle stressful situations.
Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
Why? For every accident, there are around twenty near misses. For every near miss there are several situations that could have gone bad very quickly unless the person on the spot remains calm and acts rationally.
It is essential to know how you behave under stress in most blue collar work. They're not being assholes for fun; they're doing it to save lives.
The banter is not a cunning safety plan.
And even if it was and watching sport or going down the pub was in fact an extremely safety-conscious environment compared with the sterility and politeness of, say, the aerospace industry, it's not entirely clear how encouraging people to either escalate or laugh off would help them deal with actual danger which generally requires neither of the above...
It's not about the social actions, it's the traits they represent. Are you quick-witted? Do you freeze or overreact and lash out, behave erratically? Do you stay calm? Can you think fast enough under pressure to choose to say and do things that result in laughter or de-escalation, or escalate in a way that shows you're communicating on the same level (i.e. tease back, but not overdo it and insult the other person)?
If I can't stay calm and think rapidly under mild social pressure without threat of bodily harm or lost lives, I personally wouldn't feel honest in telling my teammates, "yes, if you or I are in a situation with risk to life or limb, you should trust that I'll handle it appropriately and protect myself and/or you."
Sorry, without some sort of data I’m refusing to believe that social adeptness has anything to do with ability to act in an emergency or other high pressure situation.
My own experience in tall ships and shipyards, where there are plenty of life and death decisions is not that.
There are people that I can fluster easily in a social situation that are perfectly calm and capable in high pressure dangerous situations. There are people that are practically insult comedians that I wouldn’t want driving a car in the same parking lot.
Not to mention that people doing boring, safe jobs behave like that too. Trust me, when I have the banter with my friends in the pub, I'm really not evaluating whether I can rely on their accountancy or web design to save my life
What actually seems to be the common factor is male groups in informal settings
No, I don't think ability to banter has any relationship with ability to properly handle those risky situations. There's zero intrinsic reason why someone who freezes when insulted must also freeze if a bay crane lift starts going wrong, because to me they are clearly different kinds of stress.
People have tried to study groups like Medal of Honor recipients, and found that they have a wide range of different backgrounds and personalities.
Our assumptions about who will succeed in the most difficult situations don't seem to hold up.
> sterility and politeness of, say, the aerospace industry,
I work in that industry and can say with confidence that statement is false.
Sterility and politeness is variable, but I also work in that industry and have yet to encounter a situation where the banter resembles that of a largely risk free but comparably male environment like, say a sports ground or pub lunch with friends I've known since we were kids.
Which is a good thing really, because I wouldn't want to think that people were actually determining fitness to be trusted with a soldering iron or embedded systems design based on their witty comebacks or tolerance for jokes about their wife.
i agree it's not cunning or a plan, but that doesn't exclude the possibility that this is an evolutionary/societal adaptation that _really works_.
Two things can be true at the same time: that this type of banter has undesirable consequences as well as desirable ones. This type of nuance is generally the sort of thing that's worth trying to understand before you try to 'fix' it.
> Women don't understand this, but nearly all men do.
I completely agree with you about the purpose and value of banter- but do you actually know any women or interact with any on a regular basis?
It's simply not true- women banter with each other just as much as men do, and they especially banter with men they are interested in romantically- for the exact reason you mention - to see if they handle stressful situations well, which is a desirable (attractive) trait in a romantic partner.
I'll admit women tend to be more subtle with this then men- such that some people (especially the ones who are failing the test) will mistake it as complaining or arguing.
I enjoy it very much when my wife does this- I usually respond by turning it into some kind of joke, or turning it back on her in a way she doesn't expect, and I can see her light up with joy that I 'got it' and didn't respond with frustration/etc.
My mother and father were both fishermen. They would've shitcanned someone firing off slurs in the middle of a stressful situation, because if you're doing that then you're making a stressful situation worse.
Or, they’re doing it to blow off aforementioned stress.
This is so bizarre. No, it's not. It's to shit on the new guy because he's new or different or whatever. You just made up a post-facto justification for bullying out of whole cloth and tried to make it sound like some social benefit.
It’s strange but it’s a fine line. Being made fun of your physical attributes is pretty par for the course in most male groups and it paradoxically makes the place more comfortable to be in. Women just don’t get how this works. Obviously I’m talking about most places. Sometimes it’s just truly evil bullying because they genuinely hate you.
Women get how this works just fine. If you think it makes the group more comfortable to be in, you’re simply falling for the yoke of patriarchy.
That is not true. The goal of banter isn't to belittle others seriously, it is often just used to break the ice or for some fun in between work. It is not about a group bullying another.
Many places that require nice language are far more toxic. Or perhaps any place with strict behavior and language rules is toxic, it often seems to be the case.
The parent said that women don't get it. I disagree, most of them working in such environments get it just like men. There are some exceptions for either gender.
The role of banter absolutely can be to belittle people -frequently it’s used as a tool for establishing a pecking order.
There’s nothing better for team cohesion than agreeing on the person you are going to bully
I am so glad that the betting culture all but dissapeared before I entered the workforce.
Hearing old stories of what people did make it seem like some sort of thug culture. I wonder what share of workplace 'accidents' was due to betting.
Close people can joke like that. Joking like that before you become close is rough attempt at manufacturing closeness fast. If it works it works, if it doesn't it gets nasty.
Then I suppose I like the patriarchy.
Why? Men make fun of themselves and each other all the time. It's how we talk. It honestly isn't negative; it's almost a form of banter that tells the truth in a low-key softball way where we can all laugh. Why is banter not acceptable? Who went and took the fun out of life? I'm not talking here about purposefully mean banter or taking things too far. But come on, who made these "rules" you speak of?
Banter is wonderful when you are part of the in group, especially if you are the dominant player in that group. But it is often used by members of the in group to marginalise those outside and to maintain the dominance of the leading players in the in group.
I am a man. I don’t know who this “we” is you speak of. Sure as hell isn’t me or my friends.
Assholes exist everywhere, but “we” don’t have to apologize for them or make the workplace a safer space for them.
I'm a man, and literally every male friend I've ever had engages in this kind of banter. If you and your friends don't, you are outliers.
I like how you've defined yourself as the norm and not the GP, even though you're both calling from your personal experience with a sample size of one.
It's fascinating for me to watch these comment threads blow up, I hadn't thought this would take off so much.
It's a constant stream of "but my guys don't do this" "but my guys do do this".
It's all just rephrasing of, well, this is the highbrow culture, and this is the working class culture, and I'm in one or the other and you're abnormal.
The reality is that it's just two different worlds and where they clash things get weird.
Looking at _so many_ responses to my post, almost none of which actually have new content, makes me think this is some sort of dead internet bots vs. bots contest.
Only one side is making positive claims in this thread.
I never made a claim that "all men do X" or that "shop talk and banter are fairly universal". I did point out that I and my friends do not mock our friends and colleagues.
Still avoiding positive claims, but here are some normative claims:
You do understand "If I can't mock people, what joy is there left in the world?" could make you look like an asshole, right?
Just telling the truth in a low key softball way where we can all laugh, and of course you're laughing right along with me.
Fair, but trying to enforce "you're never allowed to mock people, even when those people expect enjoy it and it's all in good fun" also makes you an asshole. Different behaviors are appropriate for different groups. I have groups I swear in, and ones I avoid it in. Same thing.
How do you know whether the people being mocked genuinely enjoy it or the culture requires them to appear like they enjoy it?
The same way you know whether it's ok to talk about someone's family life, or politics, or anything else; you get to know them.
Mockery can be cruel, and even gentle mocking can be irritating or even harmful if it's very repetitious. Mockery is not always appropriate, or even truly funny. Mocking others is not an especially important activity or an especially important form of humor.
Even so, categorical prohibitions of mockery (in society, in particular workplaces, whatever) are truly and obviously joyless propositions. Maybe they're warranted in some contexts! But to say 'there can be no mockery' is indeed inherently stifling.
Speak for yourself. I don’t treat people I care about that way.
Almost every time someone brings it up, people dismiss sexism, racism, etc. and their impacts. If I want to know the impact of, e.g., weather on farming, or the hurricane, I ask someone who has experienced it. This person had these experiences; you didn't but that's irrelevant.
> posh ... highbrow
It's using a stereotype as argument - perhaps not coincidentally - rather than listening to what people actually say.
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?
I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.
Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.
> universal conscription
No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor
Look at it more like part of the education system.
Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.
And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.
I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011. Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.
Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.
"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".
You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.
If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.
But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.
There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US
We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.
> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?
Yes, but most 1st world nations have all-volunteer armies, not conscription.
All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.
Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.
Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.
Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.
> No thanks, Ill take anything that isn’t involuntary labor
And involuntary restrictions of basic freedoms like what and when to eat and where and when to sleep.
Did you take two years of your life to go into the military in your early 20s?
Four years.
Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?
> find middle class folk ... to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.
I think it's the betwixt and between dynamic: working class folk know they're living on what they have coming; upper class folk know they're living on what they have; but middle class folk, no matter how they live, are only middle class folk if other middle class folk agree they are — hence the insecurity, and at one reason for the conformity.
(in the UK, I think U vs non-U started as a joke, yet was popularised by exactly the people it had been meant to be taking the piss from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English )
One point that Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System makes over and over (maybe never quite explicitly, but implicitly, throughout) is that Fussell’s “middle class” is essentially defined by being thoroughly pathetic. They’re the most class-concerned, by far, desperately anxious to signal higher class, while having no clue how to correctly do that. An Upper-Middle spots them a mile away, to say nothing of Upper. To Proles, their preferences and behavior are grating or risible. They end up jockeying awkwardly for position only amongst themselves.
Well it's not UK specicfic but as there's only really workers and owners, they could be insecure about being a slightly better paid worker?
That's one way of looking at it. But there are other ways of slicing and dicing an populace and it's capital.
There are many taxonomies of people. Workers vs owners is one, and relates to the relationship between people and the means of production. Other taxonomies are young vs old, male vs female, and class structures with more than two classes. Notice that this thread has been about social class, more than economic class.
Also, an owner - of a very limited amount. Junior partner, at best.
I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.
I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.
> I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways
Couldn't agree more!
Where do you derive your happiness now?
What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).
Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
It's hard to put into words. I think the essence of you questions is "what is your philosophy now, and how does it differ from before?" That's a question I've been struggling to conceptualize myself for a while now, so I can't describe it with any sense of coherence in a public forum.
I will say that, at the root of it all, we are who we orbit.
> Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
I was once in an environment where, depending upon how I was dressed, I would either be addressed in english and called "Sir" or addressed in spanish and called "Paisano".
Why was the community surprising? (I mean, my mental model is that most dyadic social interactions can be approached with either authority or community, so I'm not surprised that groups without much authority tend to play the community card instead)
> 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 find the same (also in the UK) from having lived in (and grown with) a non-western culture. One that is also uptight (much more so in many ways, and definitely sexist) but in a different way.
> 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
I am quite surprised at the extent to which gender stereotypes are pervasive. At a bonfire last weekend kids were being sold illuminated toys, and all the little boys had swords, and the girls had unicorns. My daughters would have wanted swords (they are teen and adult) but I have realised that is unusual.
> find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence
This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.
Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
Middle class is always more insecure. A middle-class individual could move either up or down, this causes anxiety.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I’ve also seen this. There’s more of an acknowledgment: that people will be attracted to each other (or not),the status/dating games people play will be out and open. It will be acceptable to talk about physical/sexual qualities of your coworkers, etc. That when you are in physically close proximity you might see each others sexual parts and comment on them. It will be understood that after a breakup people will be less amicable.
You can also see this in literature: look at Les Miserables. In the factory they talk about sexual fantasies of the foreman. Whereas in the context of the upper classes it’s talked about in context of love/romanticism.
Contrary to popular believe, I find this much healthier. Emotions expressed can be dealt with and moved on. Emotions suppressed grow and fester. If it’s normal to talk about who’s is attracted to who, then everyone is aware of the sexual exploits of the general manager. Therefore people know where to set boundaries. If it’s hush hush kept quiet then the exploits of the Gm can grow.
I kind of get this for men, what you're saying makes sense and is for sure the healthier option if all was equal. The sticking point is the social and power asymmetry. Being commented on in that manner is low-key kind of threatening. The name of the game is appease the guy long enough for your friends to get you out of there. And when you're at work it's hard to just leave. Guys with nothing to lose don't take soft-nos for an answer and hard-nos are how you get assaulted, from experience that one.
The dynamic works when flirting is within a social circle because bad behavior risks your social status in the group and it works in bars because you're equals, around friends, and can just leave. At work, at least in an office, is kinda the worst combination. I've seen it work well outside of office settings because there aren't as complicated power dynamics— we're all equally in the shit in the kitchen.
>I'm curious to what you mean by this
pretty much all weird gender dynamics happen in upper class and posh environments. You won't find women on a farm afraid to get their hands dirty or men afraid to stitch something. People just do the jobs that are necessary. The entire idea that women are too pristine or fragile to do any work is basically an upper class fantasy because no working class household can afford to operate like this.
Whether its the military, manufacturing or agricultural environments, anywhere that's sort of blue collar or practical people aren't obsessed with their differences that much. I grew up in a rural environment and as kids boys would play with girls, as teenagers we'd go skinny dipping, there'd be none of the weird neurotic and insecure interactions I encountered when I went to university. There's entire categories of stereotypes and boxes highly educated and "high status" people invent to separate themselves in, not just along gender lines.
I think, not being able to tell whether someone's being friendly or abusive, is a classic sign that it's probably abusive. Also, abuse is generational, so this may be how people were treated when they were starting out themselves.
I love this post. It not only makes no sense whatsoever, it flattens gender, race, being ginger, and having tattoos into one uniform measure of Otherness in a way that preserves a magical naïveté and childlike wonder that’s absent in virtually every adult
Crafting grammatically correct sentences doesn’t rewrite immutable physics.
https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/clippings/swearing-is-becomi...
Swearing and language rules are “made up”. The idea of harm is programmed into us.
People don’t riot despite receipts for priests molestation. They don’t riot over social scandal after social scandal. They’ll riot when they can’t feed their families. Most on the planet aren’t as obsessed with the pristine syntactic structures like the HN crowd. They never asked to exist and just want to live in conventional terms and die.
Like religion it’s just made up constraints; biological tick some all seeing eye will get mad.
What are you trying to say?
Never welded professionally, but I learned to weld from a few friends, one was a woman who let me into the art school's jewelry shop. She considered welding as a trade, but as someone coming out of college, part of her hesitation was that she'd be starting fresh in the workforce and, as a welder, she'd be on a more senior payscale than many of the people she'd rely on on the job site. It wasn't a dynamic she wanted to be in.
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.
I agree, this is just an expression of the real world, and some people are uncomfortable with that. In my friends & coworkers circle, there are people of all varieties and it is the conservatives who are most honest. This morning they are affirming that the dems lost because a small fraction of the population ("the alphabet people" is the term I am seeing) don't understand their place, that the rest of the world does not want to live by their rules.
It's kind of gross, sure, if you're in that minority, but a part of me can appreciate that the conservatives are honest about what's in their hearts. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation when everyone is pretending to be someone they're not.
> Any difference is going to be a target.
Those are primary school rules. Seeing adults living like that is shocking.
Primary schoolers are the sweetest people in the world. It is middle schoolers that express adult emotions with no filter. Fortunately the filter does get more effective with practice, but it is always worth remembering that at their core, most people are not fundamentally different than they were in middle school.
Seeing adults pretending not to notice differences is also shocking, funny too.
I'm sure they see the differences, just decide to evaluate them as irrelevant. Which is their right as adults.
This is common in software too. Like, you make fun of a guy for being from Kansas or generally non smart states as banter, and they'll get all riled up about it. Dude, we're just playing around about the L3 cache latency on a 9684X. It's okay if you don't know it. It's not malicious or anything. Just the amount of elitism this and elitism that. It's folks unfamiliar with an environment and the fact that some of the rough and tumble of life is helped by not being so sensitive.
There was a truth to the business about scolds and snowflakes. It's all right to have a bit of fun. No need to lose one's mind over it.
It’s never malicious when you’re the one having fun, huh?
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics
I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).
Do the women have to be the "care taker" and the men the "provider"? The proportion of jobs in developed economies that require physical strength is much lower than it used to be.
As a man who has been the primary parent for most of my children's lives (my ex is not very good with older children) I find the assumptions people make annoying. People are surprised my younger daughter lives with me rather than her mother. They struggle to find words to describe a man as primary carer.
I think this is damaging to men - bringing up children is incredibly rewarding and men are given a smaller role in it. Its damaging to women too.
Not everyone has to be - I do about half the childcare of my daughter and am often the odd-man-out at child activities. But most people have to be because that's what each sex wants. It's not a great plan to be looking for a partner by not having a job and telling everyone that your goal is to be a stay-at-home dad who wants a high-earning wife to support him. Women aren't interested in that.
I think you replied without understanding the context of the discussion.
> Shop talk and banter are fairly universal. Any difference is going to be a target.
Just that it's "universal" doesn't mean it has to be that way. For fucks sake we all exchange 40 hours a week (or more) to our employers, on top of overtime and commute. There's no reason at all anyone should have to put up with unprofessional abusive/discriminatory bullshit from anyone, no matter if customers ("Karens") or coworkers.
At least the young generation got the message, this time they have the numbers advantage to actually demand meaningful change, and we're seeing the first effects of it - particularly in the trades, that fail to attract new trainees despite pretty competitive wages.
(The next thing I'd love to see on the chopping block is corporate politics, it's utterly amazing that everyone knows at least one horror story where endless amounts of money were wasted, sometimes entire companies sank because two middle manager paper pushers thought their fiefdom wars to be more important than the success of the company at large... but apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit)
This is like someone telling a fish that there are people who live on land, and the fish saying "it doesn't have to be that way". Someone mentions a cultural difference between your group and another, and you say "the other group is wrong, my culture is right".
Instead, what you could do is think about how this is a completely arbitrary thing that the two cultures just do differently, and that maybe people shouldn't be offended by friendly banter that isn't meant to offend.
Someone with background from from the US military (OK, Ryan McBeth) recently commented something along the lines of:
> everyone is picked on. If you don't get picked on that is reason for concern.
By quoting this, do I mean to encourage bullying? No, as the kid that wasn't included during my first years of school, NO.
But there is a difference between everyone calling each other names vs everyone calling someone names etc.
I was in the US military. We all joked, in ways that probably shouldn't have been jokes, that we would "trip" on deployment to the "zone" causing trendily fire accidents for the least like members of our team.
Being US military didn't make it right, we were effectively deciding who we would kill in an effort to make the team more cohesive. That never set right with me, and I still remember the joke (but maybe it's not a joke, joke) to this day.
Don't look to the military as a model of good teamwork. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. One cannot pretend it's the right model to follow.
That’s the thing.
The line is mighty fine between bullying and good natured ribbing, and has a lot to do with group dynamics. Edgy banter can bring a group together, but bullying can do far more damage.
That's very reminiscent to arguments that western culture is just one of the possible cultures and is no better or worse than culture of pre-technological bushmen.
I agreed with you on the first bit, the second bit kind of ruins it for me.
I'm not really arguing for or against anything. It just seems structurally similar.
Sure, in the way that "exercise benefits me, therefore I should do it" and "murder benefits me, therefore I should do it" are structurally similar.
For a funny take on this, see the movie "Gran Torino", where two people excoriate each other viciously, until we the audience discover that they are actually two close friends.
Sadly, in our modern world people are not only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
Yes, if only we could aspire to ideals -- no doubt better modeled in some golden past far far from modernity -- where more "close friends" excoriate each other viciously, obviously that's perfectly healthy and nobody could possibly have any reasonable basis for preferring something else.
> only looking for things to be offended about, but are looking to be offended on behalf of other people.
It's one thing if you or someone else personally enjoys some recreational conversational sadomasochism with the right partner, likely you can even persuade people to accommodate you with talk like that.
But the idea that there can't be genuine offense, only motivated offense attributed to some handwavy goal is clearly more projective pretense than anything like actual insight.
> apparently investors/shareholders seem to not care even the tiniest bit
They rarely know anything about what middle management is doing. After all, if you own any stocks, do you know anything about the middle managers in that corporation?
Guess why I'm out of the stocks game other than the occasional gamble of meme stonks. I'm German, we don't need it either way.
The thing is, we allow corporations to become (way) too fat. When a corporation grows too big, it grows uncontrollable as well - once the complexity of any corporation grows so large that there is no way for any single person to understand at least the basic scopes of everything the corporation's parts do at the same time, all kind of auditing and oversight becomes a sham, no matter if internal (boards) or external (consultancies, auditors, regulatory agencies).
Large companies are needed to do large projects.
> When a corporation grows too big, it grows uncontrollable as well
True, which is why corporations eventually fail.
BTW, governments also grow too big and become uncontrollable.
Wishful thinking is not a strategy
You don't have to present a full strategy to discuss a problem. In my opinion a strategy is something to reach through discussion. Dismissing the discussion because of lack of results is counterproductive.
One doesn't have to present a successful strategy to illustrate why an unsuccessful strategy will fail.
Errr, it kind of is. Just not a very good one. ;)
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).
It flipped because the roles programmer (largely women) and analyst (mostly men) became programmer-analyst. The role women were dominating was collapsed into the one men already dominated.
At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.
[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.
> Women barely exist.
This is the same in blue collar environments. They have more of the levity that I'm seeking regardless.
> 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.
Maybe this is it? I'm not fully convinced. I have worked with tech dorks that had a sense of humor, and that didn't bring contentious things to the working environment. Is it a lack of wit? I don't know. The more I think about it, the more confused I get, honestly.
This is an interesting question, so here's a bit of speculation.
Banter is a matter of wit. You could call it an intellectual pursuit.
Blue collar jobs are primarily not intellectual pursuits. They need their own kind of smarts, but these smarts are relatively orthogonal to the kind of linguistic smarts used in banter, and most importantly the work output itself is not intellectual. There's little chance of the banter directly getting into the work output, and so there's little direct motivation for bosses to police it.
Software development is basically entirely an intellectual pursuit that very much overlaps the wit of banter, and banter is likely to leak into the work output. Hence easter eggs are a thing. So, bosses are more likely to want to police banter-adjacent activities, which has a likely chilling effect on banter itself.
Another, more recent, factor is that more software development activity is online/remote and therefore lower bandwidth. The subtleties of banter don't convey as well as they would in-person.
>Man, I'm really sick of the robotic culture of tech. It's such a stuffy bummer.
HN is like this too unfortunately. Anything slightly out of the high brow sanitized tech groupthink gets downvoted or flagged even if it doesn't break the rules.
It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
People are too sensitive and act on their feelings and emotions instead of logic and critical thinking. Which is ironic considering how such people pretend to be liberal, educated and all about free speech and freedom of opinion but only as long as your opinion matches theirs.
> It's mostly people who think the world must be a certain sanitized way and if you tell them the reality is otherwise they must suppress you to preserve their world view which they see as being the ritcheous one.
With regards to camaraderie and banter, I don't even want to talk about world views. I genuinely don't think they matter too much in that context. Really what I'm sick of is just a lack of any attempt to make a connection whatsoever. I don't need to align with a person politically or socially to build a connection and have good workplace banter. There's just such a fundamental unwillingness to do so, in my experience. That's what bugs me.
And I know the difference. I've been in both blue collar and white collar environments. Blue collar people look to build the connection and bond together almost immediately, just about every time. There's a period of 'feeling each other out' when you start on a new job or with a new coworker so that they can suss out _how to connect with you_. That's right: it's such a first-class citizen to their working relationships that there's an entire art form to initiating it.
Contrasting with the white collar environment... it's almost non-existent, unless you work with people who, ironically, come from blue collar environments. I think it's really sad, and I think we could benefit from being a little looser. I don't think that means we need to drag any contentious topics in, nor do I think it means that we need to drag ourselves into un-professionalism. There's just something to be said for being able to be goofy and chat with coworkers that seems to be lost on the white collar environment.
Harmony is the strength and support of all institutions. Banter and camaraderie build that harmony.
I don't know what this phenomenon is by which humans take personal experiences and attempt to extrapolate broad, sweeping generalizations and/or present anecdotal data as objective fact, but it's far too prevalent for my liking.
I'm sorry that your experiences differed from mine, but some of my best friends are connections that I organically grew in ostensibly white-collar jobs (in the education and tech sectors).
Many of the engineers I know are some of the most eclectic goofballs you'll ever meet.
I've worked a fair bit in both environments. Maybe I've somehow missed out on 'the mean', but that's my experience. I've met the eclectic goofballs in tech too, but they're far from the norm.
There is always a fine line between professionalism and stick in your arse. Of course you need to know when such a culture is adequate and when it is not. If you work in support you probably don't banter with the people calling you. That would indeed be unprofessional.
Professionalism is to keep distance to others, banter is the opposite, as it is a form of bonding.
"Modern" workplaces that advertise themselves as such are very likely toxic. Might seem counter intuitive but it is often the case in reality.
Some Indian immigrants working in tech companies have also alleged they were subject to caste discrimination by other immigrants. I have no idea how common this is but there does seem to be some actual prejudice.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/big-techs-big-pro...
> “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.” Such harassment remains common for tradeswomen
If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.
Unless there was more to it the correct answer is along the lines of "yes thankfully" and then a laugh.
I'd recommend a good look in the mirror when looking for the problem in such situations.
Same goes for the thing about trying to discreetly notifying that someone has dirty hands:
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.
More generally the saying: "when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras" comes to mind:
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.
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.
As an isolated incident, it's charming. When it's every day of your life, it gets to be upsetting. Especially when past experiences have included more than on incident where the charming line was followed by anger and insults when it wasn't properly appreciated.
Ask your female friends if it's ever happened to them. I expect a large majority of them will be able to tell you a story.
Here's the best way I've been able to come up with, to get a feel for it. Suppose you have a nice watch. When somebody says, "Nice watch!", you say, "Thanks". But when you start meeting more than one person who won't stop talking about your watch, you get a little antsy. When somebody follows up with "Give me your fucking watch!" you start to think about leaving it at home some times.
Except that when you're a woman, you can never leave that at home.
This experience really isn't just about her. It's something practically all women experience. She seems to have just assumed her audience would share that context -- perhaps a side effect of being in academia.
You can choose your response to such things. Annoying, sure. Uncomfortable, sure. But that's life. At a certain point you have to just accept that things like the comment in the GP (which, to be clear, is the behavior I'm talking about here, not actual sexual harassment) will happen to you as a woman, and you can either get upset about it constantly and view yourself as a victim, or learn to accept that that's life.
People who are not women have to deal with such things as well, as a sibling commenter pointed out. Short guys, fat guys, skinny guys, they would all get picked on (in a friendly way or otherwise). The difference is that society will not tolerate them whining about it. Women won't care and men will laugh at them. So they suck it up.
It's frustrating when people say "just talk to a woman", as if all women have the same perspective on this, or women are the only ones who experience it. It's itself a sexist thing to say. I know women who don't have this kind of victim mentality and they're happier for it.
Or you know, we can collectively work on not making people uncomfortable because of who they are. Just because a behavior is very common today doesn't mean it is universal and written in our DNA. Society has become more tolerant over time, and that is a good thing. You wouldn't tell your female assistant to wear shorter dresses like in Mad Men, even if that wasn't considered unusual in the 60s.
I never claimed we should not strive for that kind of society. My points were that: 1) this is not a problem unique to women, 2) that comment specifically should only upset you if you have a very thin skin, and 3) having a very thin skin is not a good trait to have and everyone should strive to be able to handle comments like that without getting upset.
I actually think humans will never be able to achieve a utopia where no one will ever be made uncomfortable for who they are. One problem is that some people are more sensitive than others. Put another way, someone will always get offended at something. At some point you have to draw a line and say everything on this side of the line is fine, and if you get upset, it's _your_ problem.
>having a very thin skin is not a good trait to have
It is if you get leverage from it. There is a perverse incentive to have thin skin - in fact, you can get flak for not having thin enough skin, these days. I once heard someone call it "reverse CBT". I invented a game called "Take it Personal" to demonstrate how easy this is, where the participants say anodyne things to each other and are tasked with taking offense. It is an easy game, if an unhappy one.
>learn to accept that that's life.
Yeah, harassment is is part of life. Just accept it, right!?
WTF? How low should our standards as a society be!?
As a man who lived outside western society for many years, I often received comments about my looks and mannerisms.
Did I cry like a baby, no. I made jokes about their looks and mannerisms. It's called banter.
There is a line that should not be crossed, but someone making one off comments on the out of the ordinary shouldn't be classed as harassment.
[dead]
I'm sure there's a line somewhere where "nice watch" or "you're better looking than the guy before" are acceptable
No, receiving comments like "you're better looking than the guy before" is a part of life. Using the term "harassment", which is vague enough to cover both innocuous comments like that, and actually creepy disgusting stuff, is an easy way to create a strawman.
Workers in contact with the general population ear the same jokes everyday. Ask a cashier.
Actors get their famous catchphrases thrown at them consistently as well.
That's just the way it goes.
>Ask your female friends if it's ever happened to them.
Many years ago, I used to take this advice seriously.
The feedback I got was generally along the lines of "what are you talking about?" and implications that it's weird to ask, so I stopped.
>It's something practically all women experience.
It's strange to me how so many people believe themselves to have this insight.
I think this is one of those cases where a strong majority of the population in question can handle the interactions just fine, but the ones who can not are extremely vocal about it. The complainers get their way and company policy is changed for everybody. Many people go "well, it was for the best I guess", but for others it is some whiner ruining the fun for everybody. In extreme cases we have national examples where people's entire careers have ended over a tasteless but largely harmless joke told decades earlier (See: Al Franken) and that kind of threat feels scary.
This has more nuance than just whiners vs normal people.
Using verboten words as an example, I'm often willing to stop using words that others don't like. The harm to me is low (english is a big language, there's plenty of other words left), so if there's any harm at all to another it's reasonable for me to stop using the word. Assessment of harm will vary, as will harm to me from loss of words - which is why I stand my ground on some technical words.
My line is, n* - Not even going to type it pronouns - Whatever floats your boat master->main - Sure. Fine. I guess. Stop coming in my room and messing with my stuff. master/slave->controller/peripheral - Really? I'm going to say no for now, but work on brevity and check back later. MOSI/MISO->??? - NO.
Does drawing the line there make me a bigot? Where's the cutoff?
I still get flashes of the traumatic day when I was in the kitchen area at work making myself a cup of tea and one of the female employees came in and said "You are a strong and tall man, can you get that heavy box from the top shelf for me".
I had that happen numerous times in supermarkets.
The supermarket encounters are most often dirty old women who are still stuck in the past, or have gotten away with it for so long they just don't know any better.
> dirty old women who are still stuck in the past
This counts as an inflammatory statement. Even thinking this is beneath a person of fairness. Those are people too. And you may not like the era they were in and you may want to redefine the era of today to some lala make-believe, but at no point should you disrespect and denigrate the people who don't buy in to your redefinition.
It is like saying: Windows developers are stupid and stuck in the past because they cannot get in line with programming on a mac. come on! they don't have to. And they don't want to.
It is like saying: dirty old man or even perverted old man. Which has probably been uttered 100s of thousands, maybe millions of times on this planet today in reference to men (those filthy perverts) interacting with others.
It's not sexual harassment, it's flattery to get you to do a favor for them. They would never sleep with you. It's also extremely normal and anodyne.
Why do men think sexism is symmetrical? The reason sexual overtures from men are a problem is because they are usually serious and they are statistically threatening, because men often hurt women who don't respond to them in a way they deem appropriate. You would never fear this woman.
As a fearful anxious man - Don't presume to know what I fear.
I expect variation in the women I meet, some will be scared of me and some have much bigger balls than I do. If I calibrate my banter such that 1% of women are scared, am I in the wrong?
It sounds like from your perspective, being better looking than their co-workers is a good thing. By and large, men are going to find women better looking than other men. That means the "better looking" comment is directly pointing out that the recipient of the comment is a woman.
This article is talking specifically about the ways in which it is detrimental to be a tradeswoman. So in this context, being a woman makes it more difficult for this person to their job.
Looking at another example of something that would make being a tradesperson difficult: Would you call it harassment if customers were consistently making flippant remarks about a co-worker that was missing a hand?
> It sounds like from your perspective, being better looking than their co-workers is a good thing. By and large, men are going to find women better looking than other men. That means the "better looking" comment is directly pointing out that the recipient of the comment is a woman.
It is hard to be funny without referring to anything about the current situation.
The other perspective on this is Women put a lot of care into how they look. Men don't. Admiration for your best qualities is a gesture of friendship. Same goes with those who are young and energetic. Statements like "pretty boy" is a compliment and adoration. Or statements like "big guy" or "general" for old and experienced.
I often wonder what my life would be like if I'd been told as a child that I would face discrimination. Would I attribute every failure, rejection, misfortune, and unfair treatment to systematic discrimination? I think I probably would.
> If people think this is harassment, no wonder people experience a lot of harassment.
Especially seen that people pushing for this to be considered harassment are the exact same demographic closing their eyes when it's pointed to them that number of actual rapes are going through the roof in Europe.
White men joking about a woman looking good: harassment. White women getting raped: eyes closed, don't want to hear about it.
And of course the overlap between polite people complimenting women that they're good looking and actual rapists is approximately zero.
Priorities, priorities.
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…
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.
This was my experience exactly working on a welding crew when I was 19. We worked 12s 6AM-6PM (or 6PM-6AM if on a night shift) and often worked longer. The longest shift I worked was nearly 20hr, which was great because every hour past 8hr was worth 1.5x.
"Safety" was "watch the fuck out and don't get hurt." I didn't have access to a respirator even if I had known enough to want one.
I did have enough sense to listen to the old guys who said your body can't take that kind of work for more than about 15yr without starting to break down, and that I should go to engineering school instead.
There was one (1) female welder that crew of at least 20 and she put up with a ton of overtly horrible stuff. She was also incredibly good at welding, I saw her once burn an entire 7018 rod without looking, no helmet, just by feel, and the slag came off in one piece.
[flagged]
What the fuck? Explain exactly what you mean by what you wrote. Actually, never mind. I don't care. Just please delete your worthless comment.
There is Cooter from the original Dukes of Hazzard TV show, a man: https://dukesofhazzard.fandom.com/wiki/Cooter_Davenport_(Ben...
Fun fact: the actor playing Cooter was elected a US Congressman.
Cooter is a Black dialectal term for a turtle originating from the Mandinka language, and you can see a turtle on the logo of that product.
https://crittergoo.com/collections/goo
Hahaha, wow. The other products on that page do a wonderful job of disagreeing with parent’s explanation.
There's a "one eyed snake" product too, why are we not complaining about how men will be driven from the profession with such sexist talk?
Sexualizing the product name at all is more hostile to women than the reference is hostile to men.
Are you suggesting women are less able to take hostilities than men ? Since now we have inuendos from both.
I'm suggesting that the "inuendos from both" is the wrong analysis and that the workplace issue would be the sexualization of the product name being used as a tool to harass women (there would probably also be comments made to men, but harassment would predominantly be towards women).
Context matters. In a 95% male profession, making hostile comments about women is absolutely more of an issue than similar comments about men. And vice versa in a predominantly female profession.
Hostilities from men towards women are much more dangerous and women have the correct response to be more vigilant about them.
I’m glad someone is here to argue on behalf of the cooter snot company.
What is the Mandinka people’s relation the Camel Toe and One-Eyed Snake products advertised on the website?
that's called "plausible deniability"
Deniability for accurate and true reasons is just a subset of plausible deniability
Are turtles also known for their snot, in which tips are frequently dipped?
No, but the substance looks like blue snot and you dip the hot tip in it.
Please use PPE. My dad and grandfather were both mechanics (not welders, but adjacent) and both contracted very similar bladder cancers most likely from skin exposure to a particular solvent bath chemical.
There is no reward for macho or risky behavior, only a painful/miserable death and shorter life, and less time with family. So many male members of my mom's extended family died early from tobacco use and from industrial and agricultural hazards.
That means breathing fumes, unknown substances, or fine dust without a respirator (or smoking), not using gloves while handling chemicals/coatings/etc., or putting oneself in mechanically risky situations.
TL;DR: Just use PPE.
They cost money, they're a hassle, they're not fashionable, their benefit isn't immediately obvious but so is a seatbelt until there's a known problem like DDT, asbestos, tetraethyllead lead, dirt particulates, or fiberglass.
I only weld at the edge of my garage, with the door open, with a fan running, and while wearing a respirator. Thanks for looking out for me and others.
With respect to welding, $2k for a PAPR helmet is stil a hard pill to swallow!
I wear a 3M 7502 half face respirator behind my 3M Speedglas autodark mask and it fits just fine. A proper integrated system would be nicer but this setup is safe and works for 1/10th the price. Also if it's not too hot and humid I can leave safety glasses on which is convenient for grinding--just flip up the visor and go for it, no safety squints needed.
You should see the bill for tumor removal!
There aren't so few women because the language is gross. The language is gross because there are so few women.
Then there's One-Eyed Snake something penetrating oil spray from the same company.
The idea that sexual innuendos somehow differently affect men and women is rather strange.
Women face higher consequences for pregnancy so you would expect attitudes towards sexual suggestion to be different. Also, when you're talking about a group where the gender ratio is like 20:1 the woman is going to be the butt of a disproportionate number of the jokes.
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> 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…
Makes sense. I suppose if women had invented these things, they would have been able to name them something nicer.
Men from a profession that doesn't have these issues would probably name them something nicer too.
Keep in mind that there are other products that fulfill the same need. This is essentially just novelty branding.
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> I’m resentful of these silent evaluations, particularly when I’m learning something new and trying to keep all my fingers.
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.
> Stoicism is a workaround to credibility.
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.
> The pontificating metal-shop customer should be, too.
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.
It all seems like the right idea for the wrong reasons and so the interpretation is heavily compromised by it.
Yeah, my overall reaction was kinda "Welcome to being a dude. You get shit on mercilessly until you prove otherwise. You get told to shut the fuck up and knock it out even if you're tired after 4 hours. You have to look out for yourself because nobody else is going to. God help you if you're a tiny or effeminate guy. etc."
Blue collar work sucks ass. You generally only do it because you don't have any better options.
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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.
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.
And one thing they certainly need is welders. And they're training.
The opening video even has a female welder in it.
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".
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".
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?
> people are judging her as being incompetent
She is in good company. Everyone thinks most other people are incompetent. Find the best welder you can, film them doing their thing, post it on the Internet. Watch the comments flood in with scathing criticism for how they're doing it wrong.
It's like a sport now.
Sure but it seems like they were particularly judgmental to her compared to her coworkers.
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.
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.
The comments you're complaining about appear to be men describing, from their own experiences as men, what it's like to be a man.
If you're going to imply that one needs to be a woman to understand the female perspective on these social encounters, you could at least be consistent and fair about it. As much as you might tire of seeing discussions like the current one, I tire of the insinuation - across so many discussions I've found myself stuck in across the Internet - that women have some special insight into womanhood, and also some special insight into manhood.
Just as I tire of being urged to have empathy for people unlike myself, then shouted at when my empathy leads me to the "wrong" conclusions, or told that actually having such empathy is impossible on account of my whatever immutable characteristics.
A black woman is speaking, listen and learn
> Are there actually any women in this conversation?
I think the average demographic here is the standard software engineering team in the US, unfortunately. I hope I'm wrong. There are some high profile HN'ers that are women (e.g. DoreenMichele comes to mind).
Fun fact: in eastern Europe (and Russia too?) the gender dynamics of software engineering are much more gender equal compared to the US/EU. Probably other STEM disciplines as well. I'm not sure about welding though.
I'm getting a bit side tracked with my thoughts, it's just that I think it ties into bigger issues.
I remember once being in a feminism class, as the only male, making a case for getting women into stem and it fell on deaf ears. I think that's also in part because women (and men for that matter) that take feminism classes tend to skew liberal artsy. I just happen to have a liberal artsy side and a STEM side (and a cool feminism teacher that was patient enough for all my naive questions so I felt emotionally safe to take her class).
I wish there were more women in the conversation but unfortunately there aren't. The last company I worked for happened to have an equal 50/50 gender split. That was cool. It confirmed what I thought about men and women: ignore gender and focus on personality and their thoughts. I've often been in situations where any form of stereotypes have been thrown out of the window and my last employer was one of them. It's beautiful.
Unfortunately, HN seems to be too big for that. The culture needs to shift and I don't have much of a clue how. I think in part it's with how women versus men are socialized here. Boys that are socially excluded tend to go towards computers. Girls don't really seem to be socially excluded that often compared to boys? Just brainstorming, I might be totally off.
> 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.
I'm curious how you find them frustrating. When I was reading them, I wasn't quite sure what to think about it.
By the way, I've used a throwaway because of my submission to HN, not because of this comment. I thought I was on my pseudonym account. I have autism (diagnosed in my mid thirties) and I think many people here are on the spectrum, which is what my submission is about.
> I think in part it's with how women versus men are socialized here.
Indeed. Women are socialized to seek men of higher status as a partner. Thus men feel the need to seek higher status to become an attractive mate. And so men "infiltrate" any position that offers a chance at higher status (at least where high pay stands in as a proxy). Likewise, men are socialized to seek women with beauty rather than status, so there is little imperative for women to seek professions of status, but do benefit from careers that will preserve their beauty – so something like welding in a harsh environment that is hard on one's health is not a top choice.
That said, the social norms do seem to be changing. It appears the younger generations aren't coupling up so much anymore, and if that trend continues attracting a mate may no longer be a consideration.
You can't just say random garbage and use it to justify a wack conclusion, dude.
That last line truly took the cake. I've heard "romance is dead" before, but this person is suggesting that all relationships are gone haha.
I provably can. I just did it. You didn't think this through, did you?
>I think the average demographic here is the standard software engineering team in the US, unfortunately
I think this would be extremely generous to the demographic here. Women get paid for their time and get to solve problems they might be interested in at work, so it makes sense for them to want to be there. Women do not get paid to be condescended towards on a tech bro website like hacker news.
Even if women might read the front page, I do not know why they would want to participate in the conversation on this site, honestly. It is hard to articulate the totality of the issue to someone who participates and does not see it. This community *is* obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
I'm female and I've been here, on and off, since Hacker News was founded. (I burn accounts every so often so I don't get attached to them.)
I participate for a few reasons:
1.) I'm a 3rd generation techie and that's a fairly rare perspective, particularly for people of my age group (I'm 36). HN is one of the few places online that can appreciate that nuance and why it might matter. Related to this, I'm a woman who can in no way be considered an interloper or someone who doesn't understand the culture or the professions. I'm basically here to offer the perspective that the average HN user might hear from his daughter in 10-30 years when I opine on gender stuff.
2.) It's one of the few places with a decent age spread amongst users. Too many other sites are dominated by people under the age of 30 (to be generous).
3.) It's text based and amenable to long format textual discussions, which are how I prefer to interact online since I joined the WWW in 1993 and grew up with the text based Web.
4.) It's somewhere online where a good chunk of the userbase is more technologically proficient than I am and I like talking to people who know more than me about esoteric subjects.
It's totally okay if you don't want to go into a nuanced discussion. I guess I'm just bored and curious. Overall, I find your comment interesting.
> a tech bro website like hacker news
HN doesn't feel like that to me. Whenever I'm here, I have my brainstorm and science hat on. Nothing more, nothing less. To call HN a tech bro site, it seems to be a bit of an attack and not conductive towards the discussion. I guess the definition of tech bro differs. Also, being a male that doesn't care too much about its own gender, I am probably "well-suited" to not care.
In my case, I draw the line if they're also into sports (like going to a soccer match or something). Probably others don't. But that's why I have a bit of an issue with words like "tech bros". Like, do tech bros even lift? Most don't seem to. The characterization is too vague.
> Women do not get paid to be condescended towards
That makes sense, and I can imagine how it is experienced as such. It's sad to see.
I remember being on a subreddit once and experiencing it the other way (r/womenover30 or something). When I said something I was downvoted. If a woman said the same thing, she wasn't. I can imagine some women feel that a bit here. Perhaps a lot, but my imagination fails there. I get that it sucks.
> This community is obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
What does it mean to be obnoxiously male? I've seen so many different ideas on what it means to be male that I honestly stopped giving a shit about what people mean. It's too confusing, despite me being a hetero cis white male.
I guess it's the autism. Whenever it comes to gender (masculinity and femininity) I mostly see rhetorical nonsense (e.g. some people saying that being emotional sensitive is a feminine quality. It is most likely true that more women are like that, but I just find that whole frame of thinking toxic as the word "femininity" almost implies it's inherent, which I think is highly debatable - I can go on like that for a while, also about masculinity). Could you be a bit more factual so I can make my own conclusions?
I mean, I've been to a feminism class and while that was really useful, I still think the typology is silly.
---
That it is seen as condenscending, that depends. With regards to condescending on women in this thread, I see that. I've also seen it to some extent in other threads. But condescending in general? No. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but you write a little hand wavy at times. I mean, the points you make still stand, but I think they'd stand better without the labeling things so strongly that are clearly a strong interpretation that I don't understand how you get to it.
I do get the general vibe of the average Hacker News person when the subject is about dating. Comments tend to steer towards hopelessness, and that particular way of being I found is strongly correlated with being out of touch with how women look at certain things. I get the sense when women write something the average HN commenter has an issue to not look past their own trauma in order to listen to what women are saying. In that sense, I can see it's off putting.
I really believe that you are approaching this in good faith, so I will do the same. I don't have time to really dig into this deeply with you so these brief justifications of my stance will have to suffice. I don't understand some of your tangents, and you will have to forgive me for not addressing the reddit or sports stuff.
> Re: tech bro
The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of "founders". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking.
The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro "thing". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY
> Re: obnoxiously male
This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comment sections on HN, but let's just talk about this comment section.
Commenters here are confidently asserting that the author's lived experience is wrong because of a certain interpretation of the words that they typed in the article. When she says that someone made comments that made her feel othered, the reaction here is to disbelieve and downplay. That is very much a "obnoxiously male" way of approaching things. In more balanced spaces, the presumption would be that this blog post was made for a reason and that the person who made it is valid and rational by default. Nobody here has any additional information, and they are asserting that their interpretation of her words is correct even though they are heavily influenced by their own biases of gender, class, and otherwise.
My partner's a welder. None of the comments here surprise me, sadly... you're right.
I suspect you might even be overestimating.
Lol no there aren’t.
100% agree, every comment seems to be men explaining why the author's problems are actually not that bad.
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.
I don't know about serial killers, normally they are in prison if known. But felons, yes definitely. A criminal record is not disqualifying in most trades and unions.
My experience w/ metal workers of all types holds true to this. I think it's the fumes.
That theory does make sense. Half of serial killers have had traumatic brain injuries -- this would just be more of the same.
Seconded. Hiring Machinists at work we went through a few ex cons and wound up hiring one for a few years which turned out to be a nightmare. Now we have a hippy in a band who makes inappropriate comments. You cant win.
> The man in the audience at the academic conference who wants to lecture rather than ask a question...
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.
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 ...".
He felt put down and he'd have done exactly same had she been a man.
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.
I agree some of this is class warfare not gender warfare.
Liked the article. Odd to say that of a sad observation of life's iniquities, but it's a good article I think.
All that I can add of value is summed up in the phrase "Sweet hood, you go girl!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am happy to see you proud of your uncle, and am very sorry for your loss. You aptly described why the trades are in decline across the country:
> 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.
This is why. There's no appetite to do this kind of work. People are too comfortable.
Only 5.3%? That's a lot more than I expected.
> 'comparing me to my co-worker: “You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.”'
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...
> 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.
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.
Perhaps I'm picturing the situation wrong, but why wouldn't it work on the precision levels of a tape measure?
The most obvious reason is if your blade isn't 1/8 inch (3.17mm) thick.
If you're cutting with a bandsaw - the blade is a lot thinner than that.
And if cutting with a circular saw, the cutting teeth are wider than the main disk of the saw, which complicates matters - and I can't imagine it'd be easy to keep the tape measure hooked on either.
And of course - subtract 1/8 inch? Are you sure you don't mean add 1/8 inch? If you're learning a clever new technique, better to practice on some scrap, not do it on a customer's material while they're watching :)
At the higher level, saws have no undo function. Cut an expensive bit of metal too short? Someone has to pay $$$ for new material. Buddy on another machine did a load of work on the part before you cut it too short? He's going to have to redo it all. Who'll pay for his time? The stock you cut too short was on a long lead-time or urgent project? You just fucked up the schedule.
So if a machinist is doing some work for you and they want to measure twice and cut once - they're doing you a favour :)
>And of course - subtract 1/8 inch? Are you sure you don't mean add 1/8 inch?
Depends which side you measure, and/or how you position the saw relative to the mark, surely?
If you accept the accuracy of the tape measure, then it would work. Tape measure hook is loose for a purpose.
The request may have been to take a 24 foot segment and cut it into equal nearly 8 foot segments. Measuring all at once lets you avoid the last piece being notably shorter.
Autofeed bandsaw should hold 1/16" no problem, probably closer to 1/32", especially for short stuff.
On a full stick (20/24'), holding an 1/8, especially for hand layout and fabrication, is perfectly fine in most cases.
she may be implying a lack of precision from the floating tip on a well used/worn measuring tape. i wouldn't rely on that for anything i considered "precise". framing a house? sure.
Fun fact: the floating tip on a measuring tape is loose by design. It's to account for the width of the tip itself when you're measuring by pushing the tip into a corner, versus measuring by hooking the tip around the edge of your material.
So a "loose" tip on a measuring tape is actually more accurate than a fixed rigid tip that does not move. (though I don't think I've ever seen a tape measure that is lacking this feature)
https://asktooltalk.com/questions/faq/tools/tape_measures/ta...
I don’t know specifically, but If your saw has a stop or something that’s going to be better than repeated tape measure measurements. Also assumes that the saw blade is actually 1/8 of an inch.
Not the blade itself, but the total width of the material that will be removed as it cuts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saw#Kerf).
Unless she's cutting tubing for a nuclear reactor a tape measure is perfectly accurate.
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.
Welders don't really like their plastic testicles.
OK, I'll ask. What's wrong with using a tape measure the way the guy suggested to measure a length of pipe?
Best guess is the tolerance required for the pipe length was tighter than you can reliably get going off of a tape measure foot (which are often loose, worn, bent, etc. and not a reliable starting/zero point for precision measurement).
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.
The talk/banter between two men can be very harsh, without any malice intended.
As with most things in life, as long as both are consenting adults, great.
The photos of the welds made me think she needs to goto welding school.
Ugh. I’m a total hack and can do better.
It is annoying to be generally in support of diversity but then you get a case comes where someone is claiming discrimination and it turns out they just suck at their job. This sort of thing is just ammunition for the "dumb, barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen" crowd.
I admit it, I enjoy the FB videos for comments like this. It is hilarious. It never matters a bit whether the target is a good welder or not, guarantee a raft of people will swing by and tell them they suck.
They're not the worst welds I've ever seen but they're very good either. I would be embarrassed if those were my welds and I wouldn't take a welder with such welds seriously regardless of their gender. The quality is on the level of pretty low end job-shop. I wouldn't care about the bed slats but it would be hard for me to ignore the bad welds on anything regularly visible.
Making welds look good is more than just appearance, the appearance tells a story about how the weld was developed, how the temperature was controlled, how deep the penetration, porosity etc. It's easier to do this than do a post weld validation of weld integrity. TIG welding requires a lot of skill and is not like using a glue gun.
Laser welding on the other hand is much easier. Instead of making the large investment in time to learn how to TIG weld property she could just skip it and go direct to laser.
weld prettiness != weld goodness. I am not saying she is god's gift to welding, but without actual testing, a cross section, and xray, you cannot judge accurately.
This is why safety critical welds are xray inspected, checked for cracks, etc. Not clear if her diploma included some certs, but those typically will include a bend test and/or xray.
Not every weld has to be pretty. The ugly aluminum welds look plenty strong and are not normally visible. Welds like that can take 1/10th the time of pretty welds.
I know barely anything about welding, could you explain what a good weld would look like?
Some examples of a good weld:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.bmxmuseum.com/user-images/2...
https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.bmxmuseum.com/user-images/2...
Steady hands and a good rhythm are helpful.
I won the top welding student award at my high school. The competition wasn't great. Mostly, I just didn't smoke a ton of pot right before class.
Yeah, those TIG welds are something else, verging on trolling
I went looking for it and got distracted by the faux wood grain paint on the aluminium frame.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Her welds look a little sloppy, with too much material on them, to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
I just want my welds not to break.
Cool.
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.
> I’ve daydreamed about learning a trade – something that required both my mind and my hands.
Respect to her for actually doing it unlike every other email-job-holder who just revels in telling other people to learn a trade.
> Like other tradeswomen, I’ve learned to work around unwanted comments, including uninvited conversations with men bent on signaling their expertise.
It's obvious why an uninvited conversations are perceived as a sexism.
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.
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 could 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 sexist asshole but just being an asshole.
As the other comment rightfully notes, any difference is going to be a target.
> receive uninvited conversations with men bent on signaling their expertise all the goddamn time
My father was a mechanic. He learnt fast to stop trying to correct know-it-alls about cars. "Let 'em do stupid shit, it gives us work to bill".
I've had men try to teach me stuff a bunch of times. I listen, learn, and thank them.
Yeah, same here. Even if I know what I am doing, sometime I learn something new or a new way to approach something. Sometimes not. But then hey, free advice is worth what you paid for it.
> free advice is worth what you paid for it.
Occasionally. Many times it is worth considerably less. Time is valuable.
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.
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.
Great! I feel good watching women and men doing all the jobs and sports they can do, regardless of gender.
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.
It's not computing related, but welding is (or can be) quite a technical field, requiring years of education and experience, particulary welding exotic materials or in critical applications such as nuclear reactors. It's not all muffler shop work.
Some of us like the off-beat articles. Can only take so many "literal who tech blogger tells me why how I'm doing things is wrong" posts
> "all professions need to be at least 50% female“
I think you are the only one who said that?
Seeing a parallel to another field with more blatant examples of the types of discrimination keeping women out of tech-related jobs is helpful.
And more discussion around these issues is more likely to lead to positive outcomes than ignoring them.
> And more discussion around these issues is more likely to lead to positive outcomes than ignoring them.
Sometimes I wonder.
The left spends a lot of time pointing out that the right is bigoted, and the right just shrugs, because so what? These two groups disagree on whether there is a problem.
> You’re better looking than the guy I talked to before.” Such harassment remains common for tradeswomen...
This is not harassment.
Why should somebody’s attractiveness or looks be part of a “I need stuff welded” conversation at all?
Because people interact? Offensiveness is not "harassment".
Because we are evolved, embodied beings interacting with other embodied beings. We are not disembodied atomistic work units compelled to follow social norms invented by maladjusted corporate "ethicists".
It's a joke. Jokes are a common feature of conversation.
Welding Example:
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!
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!
Took the worn parts to a Chevy parts department -- they enjoyed helping a teenager do it yourself, first time.
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!).
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 bending bar 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 ..."!
Shocks were part of the upper A-frame pivots and poor. At a parts shop, got two piston 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!
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.
The welcome they get may depend on their race and gender.
> 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
Is this really harassment? It sounds kinda humorous or complimentary. Author seems to have no sense of humour.
Harass: to disturb or irritate by persistent acts
While one person saying this once is not necessarily harassment, the frame of reference has to be from the context of the recipient. Consider how often the author has to hear this or similar comments from customers as a result of being a woman working in a trade.
Why would you want more women to become welders? What's your motivation?
So that there can be more welders?
I'm not the author, but there are a lot of motivations one could have. The less people are constrained by stereotypes and hostility, the more they can do what they want to do, the more likely they are to be able to make a living, the less they will be beset with self-doubt, the less they will be dominated and abused by others who have more opportunities. It's about freedom. Why shouldn't women be free to be welders if they want to be?
The more women are welders, the weaker the social constraints become against women being welders; or things like welders, because the stereotypes we're talking about aren't generally so narrow.
Women aren't a special case. Lots of people are hemmed in by stereotypes and biases. Why shouldn't they be free? Well, people who get the opportunities others are fenced out of do benefit from the biases, but that's not a noble motivation.
If you want to look at hidden GDP women and access to power tools is probably a big one.
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.
We have gone from upkeep at home to asset building.
Some of this will go to careers, but it's not that simple.
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.
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%
> A near miss is often about reaction times and strength.
Funny, I thought it was about safety procedures and culture. Leaving accident avoidance up to reflexes is an incredibly poor way to build anything safely right?
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