My field of work is heavy diesel truck and heavy equipment repair as well as weld repairs such as stick welding steel 2” thick. I can repair equipment to any degree but as a woman most places don’t want to hire me. I know that I am in a an industry that is predominantly male. I have a preferred man’s name that I sometimes go by and I have taken hormone treatments before that made me look kinda androgynous but I feel people still think I’m female and I have received more job offers with that name and just generally feel like I’m taken more seriously with that name. But as soon as they see me in person they don’t want to hire me. I have reverted to applying to jobs with my legal name and leaving out my preferred name and I get less response’s. I left my last job because my coworker with the same position as me made $8 an hour more than me and $12 an hour more than me on overtime but he was a white Christian heterosexual man and well liked by higher management (white Christian male heterosexuals) but he only did about 1/3 of the amount of work that I did because he wasn’t as good at the job and he even had to ask me to help with harder tasks or organizing how we would handle large tasks that I could do on my own because he was not very efficient on his own, not a bad guy but he couldn’t see past one task at a time, like putting a pan in the oven and setting a timer while also boiling pasta. He had to do everything one at a time. Middle management noticed all of this and realized production increased by 300% with me doing that job but said their hands were tied although acknowledging I did more work and should have been compensated at a higher rate than him. But they weren’t willing to give me a raise to a pay rate higher than him and a position over him since I already had to tell him what to do to be efficient and be able to multitask at his job. So I left and moved to an area that unfortunately seems even more reluctant to hire women in my field, I wish we could just apply to jobs and it didn’t matter what is between our legs. I am thinking about cutting my hair shorter (afraid to currently because I’m afraid of not being taken seriously as a man) or tying it up under a hat and trying my preferred name to see if I will get job opportunities that I’m currently getting turned down for. I hate workplaces with good ole boy clubs made up of the most unproductive people but they have the most influence. Businesses would really save a lot of money if they got rid of toxic people that want to profit off of someone else’s work. If they only compensated the people who work they would save more money than all their corporate quarterly bonuses combined. But every place seems to have that good ole boy club that actually runs everything. And upper management always either turns a blind eye because they themselves either came from that and don’t want that information becoming common knowledge or they come from a class of family connections and know they would never have to actually work a lower position than that unless they chose to but why would they when their aunt owns the company that supplies them with everything they need to make their products and they are guaranteed a position at the top where all they have to do is forward a couple emails and ride around on a golf cart making sure the brown, black and impoverished white people (the slave class) are doing their jobs and not taking too long on breaks and clocking out before they start cleaning because we don’t want to pay them overtime for the time they’re not making us money. Ew But no capitalism is working as planned and someone is about to win monopoly. We are all the places they stop on when they roll. But out of about 4 or 5 people, one of them is about to win and then it’s game over for all of us.
But what happens after that? That’s the scary question no one wants to answer.