The Great Feminization
"In 2019, I read an article
about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the
world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. 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
cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women...
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 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), the 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 percent of judges
were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63
percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.
The same
trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of
women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through
the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the
younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.
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 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the
managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent.
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, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark,
who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data
showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example,
found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more
important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women
said the opposite.
The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups...
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.
Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times,
described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a
racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine
part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by
coworkers.” 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 Worriers: 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 mists 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.” 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 turn-taking,” 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 generations take full control.
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. 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 President 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 in how one party feels about an act in
retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made
these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and
not with the accused, who were mostly men.
These two approaches to
the law clashed 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 Title IX tribunals and the Kavanaugh hearings spread. Judges will
bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on
disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent. 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 those changes
will be. The only disagreement is over whether they will be a good
thing or a bad thing. Dahlia 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
propertied 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 throughout 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 accomplishing
the goals of many major institutions. You can have an 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 turned out they
were just better. That is why there are so many women in our newsrooms,
running our political parties, and managing our corporations...
That is what feminists think happened, but they are wrong.
Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting 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 1991 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,”
and a law firm specializing in these suits brags of settlements ranging from $450,000 to $8 million.
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
Montessori 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 are outcompeting men? Or is it
because the rules have been 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
percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now
overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent 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 disagreements too bluntly or espousing a
controversial opinion?...
Our window to do something about the Great Feminization is closing.
There are leading indicators and lagging indicators of feminization, and
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, slain by the vibe shift, but if wokeness is the
result of demographic feminization, then it will never be over as long
as the demographics remain unchanged.
As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to
pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think
solving the feminization 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 in which it is illegal for women to lose.
Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we
will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office
culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be
surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is
attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.
Because,
after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of
disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society
becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of
sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up
in a feminized world. 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 tasks they were designed to do."
Sadly, most people have a pro-female bias, so it looks like Western society is doomed.
