At a meeting of the advisory board of my university’s cybersecurity program, I was struck by how compellingly industry leaders spoke of the need for those on the engineering side to communicate more effectively with those on the business side, and vice versa.
They argued that if they could more reliably create that sort of synergy, their businesses would benefit in kind. Such interdisciplinary collaboration on a complicated task requires much more than technical prowess, since it depends on the ability to empathize and think outside of one’s own frame of reference, among other “soft skills.”
It was an unfortunate choice of words.
We hear all the time about the “soft” and “hard” skills that people need to succeed in the workplace. Soft skills are the interpersonal ones, including emotional intelligence, collaboration and communication. The hard ones are technical skills, such as computer programming, financial analysis and technical literacy.
But why describe one skill set as “soft” and another as “hard” in the first place? Collaboration doesn’t squish when you press on it, and computer programming doesn’t shatter under pressure. The terms soft and hard are metaphors — and in this case, they convey certain implicit beliefs and assumptions related to gender. When we speak of skills as either “soft” or “hard,” we are really characterizing them based on a crude understanding of gender roles.
It’s a short mental leap from calling something “soft” to believing it’s weak. So when we feminize certain skills by calling them “soft,” we devalue them.
The idea that feminine things are somehow less valuable than masculine ones is disturbing and harmful. And more to the present point, why would we value financial analysis over emotional intelligence, for example?
This gender stereotyping certainly doesn’t align with reality. Just about everyone has to collaborate at work. And just about every professional has some sort of technical skill. So why the oversimplification?
Words and names matter. We don’t communicate the objective nature of the skills themselves when we call them by metaphorical names. Instead, we convey a social judgment about what we deem masculine and feminine. The term “soft skills” is a misnomer: by using the term “soft” we imply that certain skills are less important and less respectable than the “hard” ones.
As a college dean, I find the distinction particularly relevant in the practical world of leadership. There is plenty of empirical support for the value of interpersonal skills for successful leadership. They’re essential for professional success. Laura Wilcox, director of management programs at the Harvard Extension School, observes in Emotional Intelligence is No Soft Skill that emotional intelligence “accounts for nearly 90 percent of what moves people up the ladder when IQ and technical skills are roughly similar.” But despite the evidence, Wilcox saw many managers downplay emotional intelligence as a “touchy-feely” soft skill. Why would they do this if not because of the gendered connotations?
Why should “touchy-feely” skills be less valued when the objective evidence suggests the opposite? It is arguably much more difficult to teach someone interpersonal skills than to teach someone to effectively use Excel, for example. To change this pernicious stereotyping, we have to call it out.
Why do we value technical skills over non-technical skills? People assume that everyone has non-technical skills, but that’s not so. Like technical skills, critical skills have to be cultivated. That’s what happens in those college courses in the humanities that are so often caricatured as “useless.”
The liberal arts, generally speaking, are supposed to develop the whole person, not just one’s technical side. The various skills that employers expect of recent graduates — such as inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, teamwork and problem-solving, intercultural knowledge and competence, ethical reasoning — are part and parcel of a liberal arts education. Yes, these skills may be harder to measure than technical ones, but they are indeed measurable and no less important. They’re also useful: Numerous reports show that liberal arts graduates have no trouble getting jobs and do superbly well in a range of industries. Nevertheless, skepticism remains about the return on investment of a liberal education. Why? The stereotyping of “hard” and “soft” skills surely plays a role.
The liberal arts may be even more valuable in the technological workforce of the future. A 2018 report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities quotes businessman and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who says that “there’s going to be a great demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors,” more than for programming and engineering, “because when the data is all being spit out for you,” workplaces will need “free thinker[s]” to provide “a different view of the data.”
One way to stop devaluing “soft” skills, and the disciplines and fields most associated with their development, is to stop using this terminology.
When we refer to skills such as communication, empathy and emotional intelligence, we are referring to interpersonal skills, broadly speaking. So let’s call them interpersonal skills. Likewise, when we’re talking about computer programming, we are referring to technical skills. So let’s simply call them that. To do anything else will perpetuate gender stereotypes and the denigration of so-called feminine skills and subjects.
Robin L. Cautin, Ph.D., is the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and professor of psychology at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield.