June 2008 Edition

EDITOR'S CORNER

 

Let’s Make Machining a Girlie Profession

Isn’t it about time to drop our gender blinders about which sex belongs in the shop?

The April cover of MAN [MAN, Vol. 42, No. 4, April, 2008, cover] featured a photo of a woman working with a waterjet at the Engines and Energy Conversion Lab at Colorado State University. It drew the following comment from a reader:

Good job on the cover photo for April. Showing a young woman working with advanced manufacturing doesn’t happen often enough. Can’t remember the last time I saw a manufacturing technical publication do this.

He’s right. Take a look at all of the business-to-business publications out there dealing with working metal. In any one month, be it in the editorial content or the advertisements, I’d bet there aren’t more than five women shown doing jobs in a shop or a contract manufacturer. Why is this?

I’m not about to get on a soap box and declare a Title IX mandate for businesses that requires specific percentages of women must be hired by shops. I don’t believe in preferential quotas. Shops – and business in general – should hire the best qualified candidates despite gender, race, or other factors. I’m just wondering what is it that keeps women from entering the metalworking trades.

Expanding Gender Roles

Tradition is one factor. Back in days shown in the "The Bull of the Woods" cartoons MAN’s been running, society dictated a woman’s role was to raise children and keep house. A man’s role was to work and bring home a pay check. The role assignments of men-be-the-providers while woman-stay-at-home probably dates back to when Gurg the Caveman ran down wooly mammoths while Gurt, his wife, stayed back in the cave and made sure the kids – Grunt and Gurl – weren’t eaten by wolves, cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, or run over by buses driven by Barney Rubble.

But, today, we live in more enlightened, and economically-perilous times. Now, both men and women are expected to run down that mammoth . . . well, at least expected – and required by financial circumstances – to hold down a job and earn a living.

While physical strength may set some jobs apart by gender, most jobs in shops require more skill than brute force ability. Women can do most shop jobs. But, do they have the inclination?

Before the 1960s, toys were segregated by gender. Boys got trucks and girls got dolls. Then came G.I. Joe. In his first incarnation, Joe was a 12" doll targeted at boys. He came with different uniforms – for a girl’s doll they’d be called outfits – and had "manly" accoutrements such as firearms and grappling hooks. Maybe he was supposed to be a large-scale version of the little green "army man," but for those who could see beyond the marketing hype, Joe was a doll for boys. Cracks were beginning to show in the gender-specific wall that separated toys.

The trouble was, there was no ground-breaking gender-crossover toy for girls, no My Little Pony front-end loaders. As far as I know, there aren’t yet any pink eight-axle dump trucks at Toys R Us, but things are changing slowly. Pokeman and its ilk are providing gender-equality play. Laura Croft makes Indiana Jones look caring and nurturing. The future might even hold a Weldie the metal-joining Care Bear.

Clean-hands Professions

Girls, and woman, are informally taught to avoid the dirty-fingernail trades. Machining, automotive repair, and construction were trades for which society hinted were not for women. Better to be a teacher [but only up to high school], a secretary, or a data-entry clerk.

The computer revolution has helped change things. Programming is gender-neutral. As numerically-controlled machines, and computer numerically-controlled machines have displaced older metalworking technology with more brain than brawn requirements, opportunities for women in the shop have expanded.

But, even as opportunities have opened for women in the shop, has society’s attitudes changed enough to remove any social stigma from a woman doing what was traditionally a man’s job? Even as we become a more accepting society, people still look askance at women in what were men-exclusive jobs such as machining, truck driving, and the construction trades. They’re considered a bit odd, along the lines of a barking cat.

Let’s try to drop our prejudices and try to put the best people in the jobs we have, no matter what they look like. See the item about Rachael Lockett in Industry News for a good example.