Welding is overwhelming a male profession. At least 85 percent of professional welders are male.
Is it a goal to make 50 percent of welders male and female? Why? How about equal representation between asian and white welders ? again why?
In todays world women welders are encouraged and hired with little difficulty. You could argue that they have close to an equal opportunity as anyone to become a welder (perhaps more so).
Just because this metric group does not work out proportionally to the population base does not necessarily indicate oppression.
It is possible that many women for some unknown reason just don’t want to be welders… maybe that’s okay.
> In todays world women welders are encouraged and hired with little difficulty.
This is where you go off the rails. I know two women that are journeyman electricians. The amount of bullshit they have to continuously turn the other cheek on is incredible. They're put in a lose lose situation where sticking up for themselves will backfire, but not being confrontational means they continue to get thrown all sorts of harassment, abuse, and a lot of nonsense about who works what task on big jobs.
When we see disparities this huge, in jobs that are definitely desirable, it's smoke. Then you actually go talk to women in these industries, and they will indeed confirm that there's a huge fire.
This is not some great philosophical question about equality of outcomes and the sad unknowable complexity of how it relates to equality of opportunity. That's just an excuse to tell people trying to put out an obvious fire that they should just stop.
In particular I'd suggest you read the history of what happened to women that learned industrial fabrication skills during WW2 and wanted to keep working with them.
Agreed. I know more than one woman who endured very gender-specific abuse in physical trades, and this was in the past 10 years. The flip side of this is that men are frequently demeaned and harassed for entering traditional "female" jobs: teaching younger children, nursing, and so on. The cultural pressures causing this sorting are still very strong.
That said, I don't think this is something that can be entirely addressed by government action. Government can take action against overt harassment, but you can't pass a law against your grandma thinking your job means you're gay (true story, in the case of a friend of mine).
Harassment is not okay but who cares if grandma think your job means you're gay. Grandma thinking you're gay (or thinking a job is girly or boyish) is not a real obstacle to opportunity and lumping it in with harassment just confuses the problem.
People will always have various pressures and cultural biases that inform what occupations are picked. Humans are not the same, not every difference of opinion needs to be stamped out however misguided you believe them to be.
Whether it's a problem that your grandma, or anyone else, thinks you're gay for having a certain job, depends entirely to how much discrimination gay people get from society. I think that the less discrimination gay people get, the less likely people are to think you're gay for having a certain job. All of this is connected somehow.
He isn't talking about grandmas. At least in the UK the primary reason for the steep decline in male primary school teachers is the perception that men are much more likely to be targeted by false claims of child abuse, and will be treated much less fairly if so.
I remember reading a story about such a case some years ago. The male teacher in it had eventually proven his innocence and that the child was a malicious liar, but the process had wrecked his family and made him unemployed. He wasn't going back into teaching and stated to the press, very clearly, that no man should ever work with children because the female-dominated profession would always find a man guilty until proven innocent, regardless of the merits of any case. I remember it clearly because his view was so stark, so bleak and yet so well articulated and justified. I decided right there and then that I'd take his advice and stay well away from teaching.
Not that things change much as adults, of course. Every time there's a run of men proving their innocence in false rape cases (in the UK), feminists go nuts and insist the law is changed to prevent men using that tactic to prove their innocence in future. The "females must always win" mentality is pervasive and makes working in female dominated professions risky.
There are many professions like this. My sons school has 35 teachers, none of which are men. Nursing seems to be another profession with many more women than men. Same with spa workers. Truck drivers are mostly men. Movers. NFL football players.
>No, but we are supposed to remove the barriers that prevent men becoming nurses and teachers, women becoming truck drivers, etc., etc.
I think this is a dangerous example in certain professions.
For example, someone I know was a volunteer fire fighter in a specific area that regularly required high risk fire suits + masks + oxygen tanks + supplemental gear. This is a huge amount of weight to be carrying around in sweltering temperatures, before even helping victims, or swinging an axe.
Likewise combat loads in the armed forces are regularly exceeding 40 lbs not to include crew served weapon systems. Add a stinger, a machine gun with a tripod+ full load, a Javelin, or a disassembled mortar and you have some serious weight. Armed forces have to remain mobile even when loaded.
Physics and engineering problems prevent the simplistic modification of these jobs to those that cannot meet the grueling physical requirements.
I think it is far better to define certain occupational requirements by certain requirements for entry. Now I know 95% of jobs don't require these, but for those that do it is a life & death matter.
Yes, but those aren't gender issues, those are a matter of strength requirements. And of course physical strength correlates with gender, but it's not true that all men are stronger than all women. Women who meet those requirements should be able to do those jobs and not get discriminated for it. And men who don't meet those requirements shouldn't be expected to do those jobs.
So, all legal barriers have been removed for decades. There may be cultural barriers, or cultural incentives. How can you know when other barriers are gone, and you have a job that is just naturally more appealing to men or women?
Sometimes the change over time in professions like law has been used to disprove this case for formerly male dominated professions. This is also the case in teaching. There were far more male primary school teachers in the past.
The actual cause of the decline is usually identified as the risk of false claims of sexual abuse, which are taken far too seriously by the system and unfortunately too many parents/teachers take the stance of guilty-until-proven-innocent.
Welding is overwhelming a male profession. At least 85 percent of professional welders are male.
Is it a goal to make 50 percent of welders male and female? Why? How about equal representation between asian and white welders ? again why?
In todays world women welders are encouraged and hired with little difficulty. You could argue that they have close to an equal opportunity as anyone to become a welder (perhaps more so).
Just because this metric group does not work out proportionally to the population base does not necessarily indicate oppression.
It is possible that many women for some unknown reason just don’t want to be welders… maybe that’s okay.