Transcription
An article getting a lot of attention, and rightfully so, titled "The Great Feminization," and written by Helen Andrews. She talks about the feminization of our institutions and how that shift has led to less than ideal conditions for men, as well as suboptimal outcomes for the institutions themselves. It's a bit of a long article. It's not super long, but I think it's very important, and it brings up a problem that more people need to know exists. And, uh, she did a great job. "The Great Feminization," Helen Andrews.
In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers in Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym Jay Stone, argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire woke era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was canceled, and most of all, who did the cancelling: women.
The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14th, 2005, at a conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce, Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to different availability of aptitude at the high end, as well as taste differences between men and women not attributable to socialization. Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and eventually Summers' resignation. He said a little bit too much truth, and it pissed off the women.
The essay argued that it wasn't just that women had canceled the president of Harvard. It was that they "can-celled" him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. "When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more assistant each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria. Hey, key word there: hysteria.
This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the "Great Feminization" thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book's length. Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.
How did I not see it before? Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past, before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court justice (1981). A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5% of judges were female. Today, women are 33% of the judges in America, and 63% of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden. Wow.
The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 60s and the 70s, increasing female representation through the 1980s and 90s, and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 20s. In 1974, only 10% of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018, and today the female share is 55%. Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in '23. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America, but they might be soon, as they are now 46%.
So, the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female. The substance fits too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.
Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the "Great Feminization" thesis—Noah Carl, Bo Weard, Corey Clark—who looked at feminization's effect on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71% of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59% of women said the opposite.
The most relevant differences are not about individuals, but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique, and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day. But groups of men and women display consistent differences, which makes sense if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of 10 random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of 10 men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.
Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly, while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.
Barry Weiss, in her letter of resignation from the New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as "a racist and Nazi a bigot." This is the most feminine part. Colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by co-workers. Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism. Obviously, it was also very feminine.
Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was, in many ways, a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day, but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now, that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of COVID lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.
One book that helped me put the pieces together was "Warriors and Warriors: The Survival of the Sexes" by psychology professor Joyce Benenson. She theorizes that men developed group dynamics optimized for war, while women developed group dynamics optimized for protecting their offspring. These habits, formed in the midst of prehistory, explain why experimenters in a modern psychology lab, in a study that Benenson cites, observed that a group of men given a task will jockey for talking time, disagree loudly, and then cheerfully relay a solution to the experimenter. Huh. A group of women given the same task will politely inquire about one another's personal backgrounds and relationships, accompanied by much eye contact, smiling, and turntaking, and pay little attention to the task that the experimenter presented.
The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored. After the dispute is settled, men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women's conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict, but by covert competition with rivals with no clear terminus.
All of these observations matched my observations of wokeness. But soon, the happy thrill of discovering a new theory eventually gave way to a sinking feeling. If wokeness really is the result of the "Great Feminization," then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generation takes full control. Well, we hope that's not going to happen. Hopefully, the young men continue to become more and more conservative than many people expect them to be.
The threat posed by wokeness can be large or small, depending on the industry. It's sad that English departments are all feminized now, but most people's daily lives are unaffected by it. Other fields matter more. You might not be a journalist, but you live in a country where what gets written in the New York Times determines what is publicly accepted as the truth. If the Times becomes a place where in-group consensus can suppress unpopular facts more so than it already does, that affects every citizen. The field that frightens me most is the law. And I totally agree with her on this. All of us depend on a functioning legal system. And to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.
The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them, even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic. A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses, established in 2011 under Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules, and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law, but they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not on how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these results sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who are mostly men.
These two approaches to the law clash vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that if Christine Blasey Ford can't provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect. If the legal profession becomes majority female, I expect to see the ethos of the Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will bend the rules for favored groups. They already do, and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. There you go.
It was possible to believe back in 1970 that introducing women into the legal profession in large numbers would have only a minor effect. That belief is no longer sustainable. The changes will be massive. Oddly enough, both sides of the political spectrum agree on what these changes will be. The only disagreement is over whether they will be a good thing or a bad thing.
Delia Lithwick opens her book, "Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America," with a scene from the Supreme Court in 2016 during oral arguments over a Texas abortion law. The three female justices, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, ignored the formal time limits, talking exuberantly over their male colleagues. Lithwick celebrated this as an "explosion of bottled-up judicial girl power" that afforded America a glimpse of what genuine gender parity, or near parity, might have meant for future women in powerful American legal institutions. Lithwick lauds women for their irreverent attitude to the law's formalities, which after all originated in an era of oppression and white supremacy. The American legal system was fundamentally a machine built to privilege proportion white men, Lithwick writes. But it's the only thing going, and you work with what you have. Those who view the law as a patriarchal relic can be expected to treat it instrumentally. If that ethos comes to prevail through our legal system, then the trappings will look the same, but a revolution will have occurred.
The "Great Feminization" is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?
The problem is not that women are less talented than men, or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplish the goals of many major institutions. You can have academia that is majority female, but it will be, as majority female departments in today's universities already are, oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn't pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren't prickly individualists who don't mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?
If the "Great Feminization" poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place. There are many people who think the "Great Feminization" is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Women were finally given a chance to compete with men, and it turns out they were just better. That is why there are so many women in our newsrooms, running our political parties, and managing our corporations. Ross Douthat described this line of thinking in an interview this year with Jonathan Chait, a right-wing publisher who helped popularize the term "the long house" as a metaphor for feminization. "Men are complaining that women are oppressing them. Isn't the long house just a long male whine about a failure to adequately compete?" Douthat asked. "Maybe you should suck it up and actually compete on the ground that we have in 21st-century America."
This is what feminists think happened, but they are wrong. Feminization is not an organic result of women out-competing men. It is an artificial result of social engineering. And if we take our thumb off the scale, it will collapse within a generation. The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten, simply in order to keep their numbers up. It is rational for them to do this because the consequences for failing to do so can be dire. Texaco, Goldman Sachs, Novartis, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that have paid nine-figure settlements in response to lawsuits alleging bias against women in hiring and promotions. No manager wants to be the person who cost his company $200 million in a gender discrimination lawsuit.
Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in '91 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women. And that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct. Dozens of Silicon Valley companies have been hit with lawsuits alleging "frat boy culture" or "toxic bro culture," ending up in settlements. Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can't sue when their workplace feels like a kindergarten. Naturally, employers err on the side of making the office softer. So, if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they're out-competing men? Or is it because the rules have changed to favor them?
A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50-50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year. In 2024, they were 56% male. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75% of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point after which they become more and more feminized. That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his agreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?
So, in September, uh, she talks about how she gave a speech and it got 100,000 views on YouTube, and it was well-received. Uh, she said that, yeah, if there are too many women in a given field, in large numbers, they can transform institutions beyond recognition in ways that make them cease to function well. It's good that people are receptive to the argument because our window to do something about this "Great Feminization" is closing. There are leading indicators and lagging indicators of feminization. We are currently at the in-between stage, when law schools are majority female but the federal bench is still majority male. In a few decades, the gender shift will have reached its natural conclusion. Many people think wokeness is over. But if wokeness is the result of demographic feminization, it will never be over as long as the demographics remain unchanged.
As a woman myself, I'm grateful for the opportunities I've had to pursue a career in editing and writing. Thankfully, I don't think solving the problem requires us to shut any doors in women's faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now, we have a nominally meritocratic system. That's true. In which it is illegal for women to lose. Let's make it hiring meritocratic in substance, and not just in name. And we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture. Again, remember the HR lady's veto power. And I think people would be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR. I remember saying that like a year ago, which were brought about by legal changes, in which legal changes can be made. Okay. All right.
I am the mother of sons who will never reach their true full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. Well, that's true. I am. We all are dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life. And we will all suffer if they cease to perform the task they were designed to do.
First of all, I think it's kind of funny how it has to be a woman writing this because, you know, if this were written by a man, it would just be labeled as misogyny. And so, again, that in and of itself is a testament to what she's saying. And it's a testament to the, to the gynocentric society we live in. You know, the female-first environment that we're in. It's just like the fact that this topic has to be brought up by a woman in order for normies to take it seriously. That, that says a lot.
But, you know, the title of this article itself represents the issue: the "Great Feminization," which has led, you know, to gynocentrism and the replacement of masculine strategy with feminine emotion across every institution. But the deeper tragedy is how this "Great Feminization" has impacted so many men themselves. And you can see it everywhere. Men who think and behave like women, centering everything around feelings instead of facts or standards, and overanalyzing their emotions. I mean, you can see it in these men and how they defend women, constantly white-knighting for them, singing for them, taking a woman's word as fact. "Hey, if the woman says it, it must be right. Just follow the women. Yeah, she's right. Why do you care about her past? Just let her hoe around and then marry her. Wife her up. What's it to you, bud? What's the big deal?"
And so, you see a lot of that, right? A lot of these guys adopting kind of a feminine approach to the world, and you can just tell that these men have been raised, taught, and managed under a feminized social order, and they embody it, right? And so, to me, it's become glaringly obvious how many men themselves have embraced the "Great Feminization." And the thing is, so many of these men have been raised predominantly by their mothers, right? And and that's just kind of a fact about America is that, yes, so many children are being predominantly raised by their mother. And when it comes to, you know, boys, that obviously replaces the best role model they could ever have, which is their father. And a mother can do her absolute best, but it still cannot make up for the lack of a father. And that's just a fact.
So, you know, I'm happy that this article is getting the attention it deserves. Just ironic again how it has to be a woman writing it in order for that to take place. But, uh, these are the things that will be forced into discussion as the problem worsens or remains unaddressed. And as history shows, civilizations that devalue masculinity and prop up femininity, they don't survive long. Uh, John Glo wrote about this decades ago in "The Fate of Empires," and he noted that an increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. And the most glaringly obvious point is what happens when women prioritize work over doing what nature gave only them the ability to do, which of course is to have children. And so, to put it very bluntly, the female influences simultaneously impacting these institutions negatively, of course, while also ensuring our extinction.
So, but let me know your thoughts below. I'd like to hear your opinions on this. And this is something that's been clearly obvious to me for a long time. The HR-ification of the workplace now. Having women around can be nice. You know, it mixes things up a bit, but men need to stay in charge. Patriarchy needs to return. Um, this is not a patriarchal country. No matter how much the feminists say it is, they're lying. And just remember, it was men who built and defended this great nation. And that remains true still to this day. But what has changed is women have gained more political and social power, which has undoubtedly coincided with the decrease in this nation's prosperity and health.