The discussion about “soft skills” being a bad word choice keeps coming up over and over. Sometimes it’s coming from a good place, sometimes it comes from just a place of misunderstanding. These are often paired with suggestions of finding different definitions, different words. But to everyone that think this, I’d like to invite to a deeper self-reflection on why they believe that “soft” is a bad word.

In short: let’s claim soft skills back.

I’ve a few reasons to suggest this, that I hope will sound compelling to you as well. Let’s get into it.

Soft is a good thing. Soft pillows. Soft landings. Soft touch. Soft approach. In many different fields and industries soft is not just a good thing, but a very desirable thing.

Soft is more difficult than hard. I know… WHAT!? this seems like a mind-twister, but that’s where the definition came from: soft and hard have been paired in 1972 because hard things are rigid, static, fixed, they are easy to measure! But soft ones? Try to measure the circumference of a pillow or the diameter of a cloud. Soft was picked exactly because it was difficult. They didn’t know how to measure it, to the point that they even snarked:

“In other words, those job functions about which we know a good deal are hard skills and those about which we know very little are soft skills”

Soft is human. Why would we want to deny that? Isn’t it worrying that we are trying so hard to deny that humans are soft, squishy, and definitely not metallic robots? Being soft is a wonderful human trait. Let’s embrace it.

Soft personalities are better. All things equal, you rather have someone soft to deal with, or hard to deal with? Most people will reply soft, and the others will likely be asking “do you mean soft as spineless?” and “do you mean hard as sincere?”. Sure exceptions exist, but there’s a reason why if you search for “soft personality” it’s all about vulnerability, humanness, and understanding, and if you search for “hard personality” you find challenges, difficulties, and drama. Which one would you like to work with?

Soft is vulnerable. And vulnerability is powerful. People that show their vulnerabilities are better managers, better at dealing with people, better at creating a great climate in a group. People that are hard and put up an armor? Not so much. Everything becomes a struggle. Sharing is difficult. Feedback is difficult. Growth is difficult. Teamwork is difficult.

And finally, have you ever wondered why nobody ever blinked about “software” (even to the point of claiming “Software is eating the world”) and yet here we are talking about finding a different name for “soft skills”? Ask yourself: what’s different between the two? Here’s an hypothesis:

Soft is considered feminine. Woah, I know. Some of you will be “nah”, some will be “duh”, and some will be “why are you making this one about feminism too?!? leave me alone!”. Yet, we can’t ignore this aspect. A lot of people find “soft skills” feminine and “hard skills” masculine, and that unfortunately brings in all the sexism and toxicity with it.

Some people reach this point and they decide to change the term. They don’t want to deal with toxicity, and they’d rather focus on the content of soft skills. It’s fair, I can’t blame them. Some of them start adopting the term Emotional Intelligence (EI) or Emotional Quotient (EQ), but even there, I’m not sure it’s considered more neutral.

And you might not think this is a reason, so this point doesn’t matter to you. But if you believe it’s right, then I would note that this is then a small part of the same argument for equality. We won’t achieve equality by working around the toxicity — insert here the poignant essay by Ursula K. Le Guin.

We achieve equality even with small choices of words, by raising awareness that these skills are good. And they are soft.

This article was originally published 1 Jul 2020 on Medium.