Soft Skills as a Female Autistic

I didn’t say you were attracted to soft tasks. i said it appears that your colleagues think that you should be attracted to soft tasks.

No problem Ree, and I wish you the same.

You know nothing about me. Attracted to soft tasks? What do you base that assumption on? 

With you there. I've raised an autistic son, and an autistic daughter. They are lovely people. No excuse for sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia. I get that the autistic brain can think black and white. Reflecting on how great the past was because everyone knew their place is stupid and narrow minded. 

This Person (Ottilie) said:

Anyway, this has become a thread about analysing why things are the way they are and I wasn't asking for things to be mansplained to me.

In an autism forum I think tangents in threads are a given. [unfortunately or fortunately as your preference may be]

This Person (Ottilie) said:

I was expressing frustration as an autistic woman. You're not an autistic woman.

Did you just assume my gender? :P Seriously though I'm just being pedantic which is something else you need to expect in an autistic forum. I'm not debating there is a double standard in your workplace ... I'm just not persuaded it has much to do with soft skills. You might rather say that it relates to soft 'tasks'. Tasks that are not work essential and are about keeping people happy. You don't need soft skills to buy someone a cake or throw a party. It's an entirely logistical problem. Social skills are not involved. It seems to me the sexist part is them assuming you would want to take charge of this. That your temperament is attracted to 'soft tasks.' So pedantic as it may seem I'm saying they are making sexist assumptions about the kind of tasks you are attracted to not the kind of tasks you are good at.

I'm surprised by the level of sexism in this forum. People passionately debate about how sexism is such agreat thing. It makes me sad. 

I'm sorry if I misunderstood your thread. I didn't think that you accept to live by them, oe maybe I did? . Not sure. Anyway, not meant to bother you but more to encourage you in fighting the stereotype as you are already doing.

Interesting that the agricultural revolution also coincided with the rise of male deity monotheism. Dominance of mother earth = decline in matriarchal societies. 

One thing I think you're overlooking is how vulnerable it makes a person to be pregnant and caring for children if the other person that's also responsible for creating the situation can deny it's their responsibility because they're not the one that's pregnant so it's easier for them to deny, and society expects less of them as a male parent. It's also really hard to earn a living and care for small children. 

Anyway, this has become a thread about analysing why things are the way they are and I wasn't asking for things to be mansplained to me. I was expressing frustration as an autistic woman. You're not an autistic woman. If you want to discuss a particular thing you are free to start your own discussion.

Sexism has worked successfully for pretty much all of human history to ensure the perpetuation and expansion of the human race, some people say too successfully. 

This was because women had no choice. 

In fairness that's probably not true. 'Most of human history' probably describes hunter gatherer societies. Many of the remaining hunter gatherer societies practice polyandry or are matriarchies. If the woman rules the cave that is a big lever of influence. It's later in subsistence agrarian societies when we moved from caves to huts working the field became more important. Hand plowing fields is hard back breaking work. Hard to do if pregnant. Arguably thats where things tilted in favour of men.

In theory when society developed to the level of cities and specialised jobs like potters and weavers, when they got sophisticated enough that houses could be bought as a commodity instead of DIY being the only option, then in theory women and men should have had pretty even influence.

But with cities came wars between cities. Cities were ruled by warrior kings and war lords. Women lacked social status because they did not go to war. In cultures where women were more involved in war women had more rights. Note a lot of conditions improved for women after their domestic service in the 2nd world war. ... which brings us more or less up to now.

You can kind of see the logic of not sending women to war though. Suppose your war kills 50% of fertile men. If each returning man impregnates two women twice fertility rates won't suffer. But we no longer do conscription. Machines win wars not throwing masses of men against the enemy. It's been that way since WW1 ended certainly since WW2. Conscription is likely never coming back. Good argument for women in the military really.

No, they weren’t.

I’m the same age (ish) as you, have lived through all the expectations and restrictions placed upon women during the last half century +.

It's relative. Do you value freedom or security? Arguably the past offered more domestic security. Especially before divorce became widely available. For example did you know women could sue husbands who ran off for support money, the common law duty of a husband to maintain his wife had no common law female equivalent and was only abolished in 2010. Few alive today will remember life before the 60s but we still have a lot of the social baggage in terms of the social expectations placed on men (from before the 60s) Where as women have shed many of the pre 60s social expectations placed on them. To some extent that's still there in the law too. Because the prejudices of judges, especially in family court, are still influenced by pre 60s ideas about men.

The more freedom you have to leave a relationship is also the freedom to be left. If you WANT to be a stay at home mom that sucks. You quit your job, move across the country for his work, and then when your kids don't come he divorces you. And you are left with no career to fall back on. If there is a prenup you don't even get much money. No child support, no nothing. You're back to square 1.

The primary social unit used to be the family which was effectively run by the women whilst the mans function was primarily to supply raw materials and whatever other resources the family needed.

Sexism has worked successfully for pretty much all of human history to ensure the perpetuation and expansion of the human race, some people say too successfully. 

This was because women had no choice. 

They were owned by men, had no powers, even of property ownership and only got the vote in the 20^th Century.

That isn’t success for women, even though you see it as such.

Men are just more suited to "spider wrangling", and women are more inclined to be "thoughtful" in real life, outside of the sloganeering, and those written simple truths would suggest that sexist roles although unequal can be very fair, when the assigned roles play to the natural strengths and mitigate the weaknesses are are statistically unique to each of the clearly quite separate and definable sexes. 

They can only be fair if there is choice.

If a woman has the choice and chooses to take on a traditional role then that’s fine.

The point of emancipation was not to free women, but to get them involved fully in the workforce and economy to make rich and powerful men richer and more powerful.

Utter nonsense.

The point of emancipation was to give women the same choices men had to live their lives freely, including the choice not to have children ie access to contraception.

If you ask any old fogey they'll talk about "how things were better", they aren't lying, things were better for the majority when we had more rigid social systems that were less accomodating to "edge of the bell curve" requirements.

No, they weren’t.

I’m the same age (ish) as you, have lived through all the expectations and restrictions placed upon women during the last half century +.

Things were not better for the MAJORITY of WOMEN.

Oh, and women's equality rights are definitely NOT 'the edge of the bell curve' requirements.

Tragically, I am only talking about this country.

In some parts of the world women are still owned by men and totally without rights.

I think what she's actually referring to is a double standard in general not soft skills. Bringing in cake of colleagues birthdays is not standard practice. Some offices do that kind of thing some don't. If you're new you catch on soon if your work place does or doesn't. It doesn't take 'skill' to know that, just observation. The 'soft skill' is in recognising the double standard that women are expected to do this work and therefor you are expected to do it. Recognising double standards may be a soft skill but it's one you shouldn't need because there shouldn't be a double standard.

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 know I'm going to get myself in some trouble here, but I simply cannot read "stupid sexist notions" without throwing a psychological "attempt to divide by zero error"

Sexism throughout a lot of human history has been far from a stupid way to organise our lives, it was based on practical neccesity and managing limited human resources for the maximum efficiency in a more brutal world. 

The primary social unit used to be the family which was effectively run by the women whilst the mans function was primarily to supply raw materials and whatever other resources the family needed.

Sexism has worked successfully for pretty much all of human history to ensure the perpetuation and expansion of the human race, some people say too successfully. 

As a hetero sexual Autistic young electronics engineer, I was really, really looking forwards to the influx of hot young women into my field of endeavour. Genuinely, I'm not kidding, I thought "Equality" was going to mean just that, women would be freed from stereotypes, enter the engineering professions, and well, I'll attach the song of "Lola the engineer" obviously written by one of my type for further explanation of my young expectations of "equality".

Sadly in the real world even after 40 years of waiting, I've not seen that influx of gifted female engineers appear.

This search conducted more diligently as I got into my twenties looking for a woman to marry, gave me the first clue that women and men are in fact possessed of essential and pretty much universal DIFFERENCES. My O/H is one of the very few women I've ever seen who can reverse park a curved approach and nail it in one, with a neat well aligned ending. 

More tellingly, the sexual drought of my twenties only ended when I stopped living how people were telling me I should and started treating women like, well, women. I.E. Embracing the sexism.

But ONLY in certain areas. 

Fortunately, my partner is an ardent feminist. She keeps my sexism in check.

In fact our roles are reversed somewhat and SHE earns the money and "calls the shots", and I try and keep house and complain endlessly about not having enough pocket money.

Previously I lived in a more traditional M/F relationship where I went out and earned the money etc. It's taken me a great deal of time to adapt to this newfangled way of doing things psychologically, but now I have, I still can't see men and women as interchangeable and fungible.

Men are just more suited to "spider wrangling", and women are more inclined to be "thoughtful" in real life, outside of the sloganeering, and those written simple truths would suggest that sexist roles although unequal can be very fair, when the assigned roles play to the natural strengths and mitigate the weaknesses are are statistically unique to each of the clearly quite separate and definable sexes. 

To call that basic human reality "stupid sexism" and rail against it seems to be missing the point altogether.

The point of emancipation was not to free women, but to get them involved fully in the workforce and economy to make rich and powerful men richer and more powerful.

And that's EXACTLY what happened. And the kids of the sixties and beyond apparently paid a heavy price for this emancipation, as the skyrocketting MH would indicate.

If you ask any old fogey they'll talk about "how things were better", they aren't lying, things were better for the majority when we had more rigid social systems that were less accomodating to "edge of the bell curve" requirements.

Using "ISMs" just over simplifies things, and leads to polarisation and is the very opposite of tolerance and respect. 

I had look up what that means.

Really? How did you find that out? 

If you want the stupid sexist notions to stop then women need to stop accepting or living by them

What makes you think I accept or live by them? I don't. I say when I won't do something. It's the expectation that annoys me. I feel like there's a secret way to be female where they get some kind of dopamine hit by caring about stuff that I just don't care about. I guess this comes under "difficulties with social communication". It's a mystery to me why some skills would be considered gender specific. 

I don't agree that it's as simple as women need to stop accepting sexism for it to stop. It's way more nuanced than that. 

I learned recently that it's actually considered a bit "infra dig" for men to send each other Christmas cards...

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 hear you. Well then maybe just stop. My boss announced that she was pregnant the other day and I couldn't bring myself to pronounce the word "congratulations". I'm still stressed about it worrying that it was rude and I might lose my job! But she seems like she moved on. They will move on too. If you want the stupid sexist notions to stop then women need to stop accepting or living by them .. I find people appreciate honestly and authenticity a lot. 

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.