A friend raised an interesting point to me the other day. The advice to use more “soft skills” means something different when given to men vs. women. Sexism in the workplace (especially in tech) means women are deemed threatening when they speak too much, are too assertive, or hold a position based on their well-established knowledge and expertise. They are often coached to “be more collaborative” by subsuming their POV to the big bosses, the alpha male in the room, or simply a culture of groupthink (this is how we’ve always done it). And worse, that alpha male will often take credit for her work up the chain, saying, “oh, we are all a team, and everyone contributed.” That sounds great, but it is bad for a woman’s career development. And you can bet, if it actually WAS an idea that originated with the alpha male, it would be HIS name on it, and his name only.
It seems men often NEED more coaching toward soft skills, as they seem to get carte blanche to be rude in meetings, assert disciplinary expertise they haven’t earned, and get to pretend “collaboration” means whatever they want to do.
Until my friend brought this up, I hadn’t thought of it that way before. There IS a genuine need for ALL participants (not just in UX) to learn and practice true collaboration in the workplace, and many men may need such career advice more than most women. BUT these days, when I hear “soft skills” cited, I hear a workplace bias code word, used for “silencing” more against women than men (and sometimes, UX plays a “feminized” role on product teams, as junior even when in a lead position, as a rhetorical supplicant, representing users, please, maybe, if someone will let us do it).
We have a lot to think about, if our disciplinary expertise counts so very little, that teensy top of the pyramid, and our primary value is as a rhetorical facilitator, all things to all people, in what are often very dysfunctional, autocratic, personality-driven teams. I would think our goal would be NOT to adopt the role of a “wife” in the 1950s Ladies Home Journal sense, where our (mixed gender) UX teams are trying to manipulate representatives from Product, Marketing, and the C-Suite as the stereotypical “husband” into doing things they don’t know they should do, and into thinking it was all their idea in the first place, in the name of rhetorical “effectiveness.”
What that sounds like to me is simply a crass reality of dysfunctional teams and workplaces, not an ideal state. In a more technocratic, ideal possible world, teams would respect the expertise of the different disciplines represented; they would confer and collaborate based on that respect, and sneaky manipulation from lower power positions would not be required.
