I think that first response points straight at the problem you're going to have.... being taken seriously by sexist men.
My father worked in mining and other related industries for 40 years. It was a man's world in much the same way that commercial diving is. In the early '80's his company started hiring women for the first time (due to anti-discrimination legislation)
His attitude (granted, he's old school so don't shoot the messenger) was that women had to "prove" that they could do the work where as a man would have "benefit of the doubt" coming out of the gate. In other words, it was assumed that a man could do the job until he proved otherwise and it was assumed that a woman couldn't do the job until she proved otherwise..... This might not be the case everywhere but I suspect that this attitude hasn't changed much since the 80's in a lot of work places.
That said, once a woman proved that she could cut it they were accepted as one of the boys. In fact, the one colleague of my father's who he one told me he had the most respect for was a woman. Was that because of her gender? No. It was because, in his words, "when you assign her a job, it's done, done right, and done on time." In other words, when the job was in focus, nobody could have cared less that it was a woman calling the shots.
I once asked her about this (she was a personal friend of my mother's) and she just said, "leading men is easy. If you say "jump" and they don't say "how high" then you raise your voice at them and make sure they know who the boss is.... in fact, it's a lot like training dogs."
The industries you'll be looking at (I know a little about it from my own background, but not about the diving part) appeal to a certain type of individual. If the following three statements are something that you really, deeply, in your heart believe are an integral part of your personality then you'll probably have, in terms of character, "the right stuff".
- the job comes first. Before family, before friends, before hobbies and even God can be put on hold if the boss orders it.
- results matter. Anything you do to get in the way of results makes you a liability. End of discussion.
- *what* is said matters more than *how* it is said. So you need a hide that can absorb some verbal abuse. Men in these kinds of environments are accustomed to communicating very directly with one another. There are risks involved in heavy industry and depending on the particular context, literally every single one of your experienced colleagues may have carried the dead body of a co-worker out of the pit at some point. Safety is an obsession and anything you do that needs "correcting" is going to be "corrected" with a sledge hammer as opposed to the kind of "neck massage" you might get in an office environment.
Of course, that's pretty "black and white" but you should get the basic idea of what it will take to get along.
As for the diving part, others are a lot better positioned to discuss that than I am. What I *do* konw about the diving is that the diving is a means to an end. You won't be a "diver who welds", you'll be a "welder who dives". That's the attitude it's going to take to get a job. You'll need to have those industry related skills sorted coming in because it won't matter if you can dive like Cousteau himself if you can't do anything useful once you're down there.
R..
