Recently, I experienced rejection from a Columbia club I idolized prior to arriving on campus. It’s a classic first-year experience and a hard lesson in the pitfalls of reverence. I’m not afraid of rejection, but clubs were crucial to my social and intellectual identity in high school. I miss their accessibility.
I reached out to my interviewer for feedback on my candidacy. I hoped to channel this insight into a reapplication next semester. A few days later, I received a reply. My application (and subsequent interview) stood out in that, apparently, I really emphasized my team-oriented, collaborative nature. They wished I’d spoken not just to soft skills, but about my specific professional abilities and values that related to the role, such as being meticulous and detail-oriented, or committed to accuracy and truth.
I was stunned because I’d done precisely as they asked. Unintentionally, parts of the email quoted my written application verbatim. I mentioned being “meticulous and detail-oriented” in those exact terms. Further, I predicated my interest in joining this group on a commitment to seeking out truth as a mechanism for justice. Being a team player was a point I made in passing, as a quality that would better enable me to apply the industry skills I possessed. Evidently, mentioning my soft skills overshadowed the entire application—the club couldn’t remember anything else about me.
The whole ordeal brought me back. On report cards growing up, teachers commented most often on my collaboration skills and ability to navigate social dynamics. From a young age, I began to view these interpersonal capacities as intrinsic to my person. Friends questioned why I was so nice, implying gestures I viewed as common decency were indeed laborious. I enjoyed helping others — I still do — but they were right. I lacked the sophistication to recognize that my instinct to give or cooperate excessively in social situations was the product of gendered conditioning. I held myself to a deeply problematic and unattainable female archetype. Over time, I reigned in this impulse to please. I still seek out and thrive in collaborative settings, but I’ve gained confidence in my ability to succeed independently.
In eleventh grade, I wrote a research paper examining how we gender professional traits in the workplace. Stereotypically, we generalize being direct, firmly impassioned, assertive of one’s strengths, and dogmatic as masculine. Cooperation and teamwork are token feminine, or “soft,” skills. I argued that, while praising leaders who channel calculating individualism, the American workforce’s implicit bias against women leads professionals to devalue civility and teamwork.
When women mention their soft skills on resumes and applications, even when we possess these traits in tandem with industry knowledge and talent, we’re more susceptible to being reduced. A man can hold multiple aspects to his professional identity; he’s celebrated for being friendly, kind, meticulous, and detail-oriented. Yet, we pigeon-hole women in the workforce into tropes; for instance, the self-serving, gifted ice queen — and her millennial cousin, the girlboss — versus a docile, unremarkable team player. Though I wrote an application that, I believe, spoke to my extensive preparedness for a role, acknowledging my soft skills diluted me into the latter.
Rejection on this basis was disheartening, but the follow-up only confirmed my resolve to extract my professional identity from fundamentally artificial, gender-based confines. I too can be friendly, kind, meticulous, and detail-oriented. And I am hopeful that, one day, the workforce will uplift multifaceted women who command recognition as just that.