There is no shortage of advice for women in the workplace.

• Stop apologizing
• Be more assertive
• Talk over those who interrupt you

Essentially this type of advice boils down to: “Be more like the (stereotypical) men, and you’ll achieve the same success!”

But does this work? Not usually, no.

But who’ll run the birthday committee?

The pandemic shone a light on something many of us have known for a while: Women run the show (from the shadows).

An outsized portion of emotional labor is done by women – not just at home, but in the office!

Women overwhelmingly run people-focused groups like birthday recognition committees, social gatherings, and office party planning. They are encouraged to “manage-up” by predicting their manager’s temperament and acting accordingly to suit his state of mind. They often serve as “team therapist”, hearing out their colleagues and translating the concerns up to the team lead (who may have the emotional intelligence of a damp brick).

Don’t Make Me Project Manage You

Even on technical projects, you will find women doing a larger share of the invisible labor they would be doing in the home: Organizing, delegating, time-tracking, and following-up. This is sometimes referred to as project management, which is actually a job that some people do full-time. Many technical women, however, find themselves doing it on top of the technical job they may already have.

Unsurprisingly, this leaves little time for the technical work and so these women appear to be less productive than their male peers. Less productive = less recognition = fewer promotions.

The Golden Parachute With A Leak

Many women might think that effective people skills could land them a technical people management role.

However these management positions are overwhelmingly given to the exact men who have the capacity to show off their technical prowess because others are handling the consistent, less-showy, less-technical work. It’s no secret that these men are notoriously bad managers. It’s just assumed that they will learn the soft skills on the job. How hard could it be?

Even if women are recognized for their efforts in technical project management, they are often steered towards roles that take advantage of these soft skills. That wouldn’t be so bad, except that these roles pay much less over the course of a career than senior technical roles. (Of course, there are always exceptions.)

The average annual salary of a project manager at the time of this writing is $94,916. Wow!

But the average salary of a software engineer is $124,251. Dang.

What’s a girl to do?

While these soft skills are always useful, in order to be recognized as worthwhile they usually need to be tied to concrete outcomes. For example, as a startup founder your employees may do better work for you if you can keep them motivated and on-task. But even then you will still face sexism in the form of insubordinate workers, chauvinist investors, and rude customers.

I don’t have a perfect prescription, but I think the answer lies with men. Women have done enough to contort themselves into the vision of The Perfect Worker. It’s time we recognized what they bring to the table and act accordingly.