Dr. Catlyn Collins is an assistant professor of sociology and of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a published author of a book titled Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.
Her areas of research are gender inequality, work, families, and social policy
According to Glassdoor, the average salary of an assistant professor at Washington University is $105,700.
Add in speaking fees and book sales and it’s clear that she is in at least the top 5% of American incomes.
On Wednesday, she wanted to show the world how virtuous of a person she is, so she Tweeted this:
If you are at all curious, the average salary for an MoDOT highway maintenance worker is $31,788.
So here is this professor, with a Ph.D. in Sociology, shaming a road crew worker who she probably makes four times the salary of and most likely only has a high school diploma and on the job training, about a sign that he did not create and is required by law to put up.
I have a couple of thoughts on the matter.
First:
Why does the sign say men working?
We can go through the history of the English language where “man” or “men” has been used as a genericization of all people, e.g., “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
But the engineer in me says that we know highway safety is a thing. A sign that is too long and complicated to read will be a driver distraction. At highway speeds “Men Working” is two words, 10 letters, and it conveys a message easy to understand.
If the sign were to be written and approved by an assistant professor of sociology and of women, gender, and sexuality studies it would probably say “men women transgender non-binary two-spirit working” and by the time you are done reading that at highway speeds, you’ve plowed your car into the back of a road crew service vehicle.
Even “people working” is longer and harder to pick up at a glance.
You want your sign to be as easily visually digestible as possible to send your message while keeping drivers’ eyes on the road. “Men working” does that in the least amount of letters.
Second:
I have never worked road construction but I have worked outside in heavy labor before.
Here is the annual high and low temperatures for St. Louis, Missouri.
A road crew worker is someone who needs to be able to work in winter below freezing and summer at 90 degrees and high humidity.
One of the the most physically intensive jobs I’ve ever had was at the paint booth at a factory in Indiana. We had to wear our PPE which was steel toe boots, jeans, and a long sleeve shirt under a Tyvek suit (a large plastic bag) in a factory with no A/C in Indiana in the summer, next to a giant pass-through oven to bake on the powder coat we were spraying.
It had to be 120 degrees in the paint booth between the near 100 degrees outside and the baking oven inside.
I remember bringing two 2.5 gallon mini coolers to work every day, filled with ice and Country Time lemonade. The coolers and a new large bag of potato chips would be empty by the time I went home. My shirts would have big white rings from all the salt in the sweat I lost during my shift. And I lost weight doing it.
The paint booth paid well, better than assembly, because it was harder and considered as skilled job (dropping rivets was entry level).
The factory hired women. We never had a woman stay on the paint booth for more than a day.
I’ve worked several jobs like that. Piping inspection engineer at a refinery was another, but substitute the Tyvek suit for a set of Nomex coveralls, and Indiana for Philadelphia.
I’m not saying women are incapable of hard work, I’m just saying I’ve never personally experienced women who wanted to be out in the blazing sun of summer or the freezing winds of winter pouring asphalt.
What I can guarantee is that no woman who would be turned off to a job by a sign saying “men working” has the endurance to actually pour boiling asphalt in the sun, heat, and humidity of a Midwestern day in August. Mother nature is far more oppressive than a road sign.
Lastly:
This is why so many on the Right get accused of being anti-academic. Because this is the shit that we see that makes us hate academia.
I am proud of my Ph.D. Mine is in engineering, and I walk a factory floor every day in composite toe boots. I don’t act like I am better than the people in assembly. I am there to help them by solving problems with my skills.
This type of academic elitism is all about reminding the non-academic non-elite about their place.
Think about this guy. He works hard in the cold rain of the Midwest right now. At the end of the day he might go to a bar with some coworkers and have a beer, every part of his body hurting.
That is the kind of toxic masculinity that this professor raves against.
So when Lefties talk about universal free college, we don’t think that we’re going to get more people on road crews fixing our highways. We think we’re going to get more sociology majors shaming those guys on Titter for working hard. And we don’t want to tax dollars to pay for that.
Maybe I am reading too much into this, but this Tweet is the kind of thing that makes me say “you know what, it’s time to shut down every sociology department in every college in America and transfer that money to community college construction programs.”
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