Published on 12, July, 2020
I've been mulling over this for a long time. In the workplace it's expected that the female/female identifying colleagues will take care of the soft skill aspects of being in a team. Team member has a birthday? Well you're expected to arrange flowers, cake, card, gift, lunch, dinner. Male members are not expected to do this kind of work. In my most recent position I have been open about being autistic yet all the time I am aware that the males get away with not giving a damn if it's someone's birthday or what a team member is going through, yet I'm expected to do the work of putting myself out because what? I have secondary sexual characteristics that in their eyes define me as woman/ nurturing/should care. I don't care unless I actually care about the person. It's stupid and unfair that in the NT world we have to survive in I'm expected to make this effort for some stupid sexist notion about what it means to be female.
This Person (Ottilie) said:the soft skill aspects of being in a team. Team member has a birthday? Well you're expected to arrange flowers, cake, card, gift, lunch, dinner.
That’s not really soft skills. At least it’s not the kind of soft skills I was bad at at the civil service. Soft skills is finding ways to tell people no without actually saying no. And conversely is the ability to figure out when people are telling you no without actually saying no. Or indeed it’s the ability to predict when they would say no before you even ask the question and therefore don’t bother asking it.
soft skills is the ability to minute a meeting where people have been screaming at each other and vehemently protesting that the proposed course of action is completely unacceptable and make it sound like everybody was okay with the plan and everything can go ahead as expected without out right lying about what was said.
that is soft skills in the civil service.
Peter said:That’s not really soft skills.
Soft skills include social skills and I think women are expected to have more social skills than men. It's more generally acceptable for men not to organise a birthday card or a gift for a colleague. I probably find social skills more difficult than a NT man but because I'm a woman I'm expected not to. The things you mentioned are soft skills too. Soft skills are defined as "personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people".
I learned recently that it's actually considered a bit "infra dig" for men to send each other Christmas cards...
And I've since made discreet enquiries as to how often men are inclined to do that sort of thing in the real world.
No matter how much people try to pretend otherwise, men and women are not fungible and entirely interchangeable at a basic level.
I go into that at greater length below.
My o/h (f) & a friend (m) told me, quite close together. Then I recalled how over the many years of making a point of including my male friends on my Christmas card list none of them ever had sent me one that I could recall.
I had look up what that means.
Really? How did you find that out?