Or, Why are men??

This is normally a topic reserved for household contexts (at least, that’s where I’ve encountered it)¹ and centred around men’s shirking of responsibility to do household labour that then ends up pushed onto women. What if men don’t just do it with household work? What if it’s also part of other realms, like say, in a university group assignment.²

Let’s take it from the top; Weaponised Incompetence

So as I briefly mentioned earlier, this concept is basically all about (typically) men shirking their responsibility to also take part in household labour (e.g., doing dishes, mopping, vacuuming). But as you might’ve guessed from the name, the shirking happens through a weaponisation of incompetence, that is, they play dumb to avoid being made to do things. For the women and especially mums among us, you’ll be very familiar with (some)³ men being so bad at doing a household chore that you think “gosh, I might as well do it myself so it’s done right!”. This is weaponised incompetence – doing something badly so someone else picks up the slack for you and eventually stops even asking you to do things.

Tuckman’s Stages of Group Formation

So this dude, Bazza Tuckman⁴, came up with a blueprint for how teams work together on a given project – there’s forming at the start, when the team is built up and no one knows how to act. Then there’s storming, when the personalities crash and the team’s performance falls off a cliff. Then eventually you get to norming, when everyone gets a feel for how they’re going to work together and finally, there’s performing, when you all know what’s going on and you peak in your performance.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, I think it maps pretty well onto at least the groups I’ve been a part of. But more importantly for the topic of this post, it can partly explain where the weaponised incompetence gets applied.

What if, as part of the storming and norming stages, someone demonstrates themselves as being incapable of doing a particular task? Whoopsie, we did a little fucky wucky and weaponised the incompetence :C

Now, normally you’d end up with at least one person who’s a bit of dead weight in a group assignment – it’s only natural, they’re not getting paid so why would they give a shit? But my experiences show that maybe there is a distinction between the standard dead weight-type group member and one that weaponises incompetence.

Dead Weight or Murder by DM Spam?

Based on a true story!

Over my university degree, I’ve had the displeasure to experience many a group project, including ones that worked well, ones that didn’t work so well, and ones that are hell. Bonus points if you can guess which one of the three I’m currently experiencing as of writing ☺️⁵.

In the groups that didn’t go well and/or went to hell, not all of them were due to dead weight. If it was just dead weight, it would be easy to drag them along and get the work done in spite of it. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to conceptualise of a couple of my experiences as cases of weaponised incompetence.

I’m not going to recount them because I don’t want to be bitter, I can and should rise above it, but I think it’s interesting to consider the fact that I’ve almost always been the only femme in the group across my degree and whenever slack needed to be pulled I’ve almost always been the one pushed into pulling said slack. And that slack just so happened to be the nitty gritty manager-y type stuff as opposed to good ol’ rough and logical coding work. Fascinating.

Also I just realised, I unintentionally did a whole git push/pull thing there. Lol.

I do think that expanding the concept of weaponised incompetence to encompass other instances of men using incompetence in a less masculine-coded task to push that task onto women would be a helpful elaboration on the concept. It’s primarily in household labour, sure, but not solely there. Patriarchy permeates everything within our society, after all.