The Great Feminization Hasn’t Gone Far Enough
What if we listened to both men and women on how to build a fair society?
When I was 13 years old, most of the girls in my single-sex school failed a question on a science test: Why do teenage boys have higher levels of iron than girls?
Different students took different approaches to the question. Maybe boys eat more red meat? Or their propensity for risk somehow gives them an added layer of protection?
The answer is so obvious that you’re screaming at me: Boys don’t get periods. Our all-girls school had lulled us into a sense that the female is the default human. Of course, this brief period of tranquility didn’t last—soon we absorbed the concept developed by Simone de Beauvoir that man is default and woman is “Other.”
Still, the intensity of an all-female environment has stayed with me in the decades since, so I read Helen Andrews’ recent viral essay “The Great Feminization” with interest and a raised eyebrow. Drawing on the blogger J. Stone, Andrews argues that many issues facing society today—especially wokeness—are in fact driven by the feminization of society. Andrews says, paraphrasing Stone, “all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”
Andrews’ argument relies on the fact that women are more likely to use ostracism and gossip to exclude or publicly shame individuals, and that these are the characteristics of left-wing cancel culture. She claims that as the number of women in various industries has grown, women began imposing these toxic norms in the workplace and public life in what she describes as a vast experiment in “social engineering.”
There is a kernel of truth to Andrews’ claims. Like many women, I’ve felt the thrill of being part of a group excluding someone, and equally have felt the sting of ostracism myself. (Anyone who has ever joined a dysfunctional team at work knows that nothing unites a group like a common enemy, whether that’s a difficult boss or the person who takes away the free coffee.)
It’s true that prominent left-wing cancellations follow similar dynamics. In 2020, Matt Yglesias left Vox for Substack after (among other things) a colleague accused him of making her feel “less safe” for signing the pro-free speech Harper’s Letter. In 2023, Carole Hooven was forced to resign from Harvard for saying sex is biological and binary. According to a survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), over half of academics are concerned about losing their jobs or reputations due to their words being used against them.
What’s more, the surge of left-wing cancel culture during the 2010s and early 2020s did, roughly, coincide with increasing female participation in both education and the workplace. While female students have outnumbered male students since 1979, traditionally male subjects such as law and medicine became majority female only in 2016 and 2017, respectively. As Andrews points out, 55% of New York Times staff are now female. This broadly matches the timeline of the rise of wokeness and cancel culture.
But scratch beneath the surface, and Andrews’ argument falls apart.
First, the Great Feminization hypothesis relies on the sweeping assumption that men are rational, while women are emotional. Of course, anger—the emotion most associated with men—is excluded from this analysis, which is strange given that it guides so much of a certain president’s behavior. A great deal of the United States’ current foreign policy seems to be guided by perceived slights to Trump rather than the rational calculations we are assured men excel at.
Meanwhile, history’s most futile wars give lie to the idea that women are uniquely driven by emotion. The Battle of the Somme—in which over one million soldiers were wounded or killed for a territorial gain of six miles—is hardly a glowing endorsement of men’s capacity for rational thought. And the recent wave of cancellations coming from the right in the wake of the murder of Charlie Kirk—much of it driven by conservative men—should make us skeptical that, as Andrews puts it, “men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women” such that they keep politics from infecting everyday life.
Then there is Andrews’ inaccurate characterization of female conflict strategies. In a recent tweet, she writes: “When the conflict is over, [men will] shake the other guy’s hand and accept the outcome gracefully. Women don’t have that. If you’re her enemy, you are subhuman garbage. No rules govern the fight; no shaking hands when it’s over. It is never over.” But this just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Peace agreements are 20% more likely to last at least two years, and 35% more likely to last 15 years, if women are part of the process.1 (Andrews also seems to contradict herself here—one moment she claims women prioritize “empathy over rationality,” and the next she acts as if women lack any empathy whatsoever.)
What about her claim that feminization is the main culprit for wokeness? The timing is dubious. The number of women studying for and entering traditionally male professions has been on the rise for decades, yet wokeness of the sort Andrews is concerned about is a fairly recent phenomenon. (Yglesias dates the “Great Awokening” to around 2014). While Andrews argues that this is because organizations reached a tipping point once they became majority female (or were heading that way), this isn’t a satisfactory answer. Even with an increasingly female workforce, most managers and CEOs are still men. And as Andrews points out, only 33% of judges today are women, which doesn’t prevent her from applying her thesis to the legal profession.
What other factors might explain wokeness? The timing fits more neatly with the rise of smartphones and social media. As Jonathan Haidt argues, these new tools triggered a wave of anxiety and depression among adolescents, as well as a broader concern for “safety” from perceived threats. Social media provided the perfect tools not only to amplify new ideas such as wokeness, but also to enforce sanctions on non-believers from the comfort of one’s own couch.
This makes sense when you consider that left-wing cancel culture arguably peaked during the COVID pandemic in 2020, when everyone was scared, confused, and isolated. Had wokeness merely been an expression of typically female behavior, the pandemic would have had a much more limited effect—and indeed wokeness would have continued to grow in strength every year since then as more women entered the workforce, when in fact the opposite seems to be the case.
The truth is that, in many ways, feminization hasn’t gone far enough—something that Andrews seems unable to recognize.
Take medicine, a subject Andrews only touches on to make the implausible point that male doctors are better than female ones at keeping politics “out of the examination room.” Historically, female patients have faced a great deal of discrimination, from doctors dismissing their symptoms to exclusion from medical studies. In her memoir Giving Up The Ghost, the novelist Hilary Mantel described her excruciating experience with endometriosis, a condition that affects one in 10 women of reproductive age, yet which even today can take between four and 11 years to diagnose. Despite negative pregnancy tests and years of pain, a doctor dismissed Mantel’s pain with the words “there’s a baby in there.” (Mantel later had a hysterectomy, including removal of part of her bladder and bowel, as a result of the disease.)
This is part of a broader trend: women are frequently ignored when reporting symptoms, and life-saving treatments are still not adequately tested for their impact on women’s bodies. The COVID vaccines were a huge scientific achievement—yet from early on in the vaccine rollout, women reported its effects on their menstrual cycle, from heavier periods to breakthrough bleeding in post-menopausal women. Vaccination studies simply didn’t look at menstrual side-effects, and both medical organizations and media outlets were initially dismissive of women’s reports. (Thankfully, the link has since been studied.)
Rather than admitting that there are some areas in which it would be better to listen to women more, Andrews is concerned with making sweeping statements about how feminization will lead to the end of Western civilization. “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,” she frets, using Obama-era Title IX regulations as an example of what a feminized legal system might look like.
This is a vast overstatement. There are real reasons to criticize the Obama-era Title IX regulations, in which many of those accused of sexual assault on college campuses had too little right to due process. While these rules came from an understandable desire to support survivors of rape and assault, in practice both women and men benefit from a fair system with due process at its heart.
But Andrews’ claim that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female” is ludicrous. Women are not immune to rationality, and the fact that women outperform men in areas of education that apparently play to male strengths, such as exams, suggests that we understand rules and arguments, too. In fact, female lawyers are 23% less likely to be sued for malpractice than male lawyers, and female partners win 12% more than men, showing that women are in fact competent at upholding the law.
More broadly, Andrews is right to be concerned that feminization is driving men away from traditionally male institutions. But once again she misidentifies the cause. Research has shown that professions dominated by women are considered less valuable, while those seen as more masculine enjoy a status (and corresponding financial) bump. This suggests that it’s not toxic female behaviors driving men away, but a lack of respect for women.
Anyone who has spent time in groups dominated by each sex knows that the social lives of men and women are very different. Until recently, I worked in predominantly female workplaces in which updates about our complex love lives were practically a standing agenda item in team meetings, and the solution to any issue was invariably “let’s all join hands.” (I loved it.) All-female groups also tend to handle conflict differently to men, for example by canvassing other members to see if there’s general agreement before making a decision on how to act.
But it’s wrong to extrapolate that feminization somehow poses a threat to civilization. Indeed, there are plenty of areas in which more feminization would improve things for men as well. Letting men take paternity leave of longer than two weeks tends to lead to more hands-on childcare, which in turn is associated with better outcomes for children. Indeed, research shows that fathers today want to spend more time with their children than those of previous generations, suggesting that both men and women would benefit from increased focus on areas of life that are traditionally considered women’s domain, such as childrearing.
Today, we are lucky that we don’t have to choose between the old, stagnant patriarchal system in which women were confined to the domestic sphere, and the cruel matriarchal system people like Andrews think we already live in. Instead, we can embrace the positive aspects of masculinity and femininity, whilst finding effective strategies to mitigate the harms of both. This means championing values and policies that lead to a free and fair society for all—even men.
Leonora Barclay is Head of Podcasts at Persuasion.
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We shouldn’t read too much into these figures, given how hard it is to control all the variables. But at the very least they suggest that women don’t actively hinder peacemaking.
Women’s demands on how society should be run have been over-voiced and over-served. They couldn’t care less if their utopia works for men. Leeching masculinity from humanity, to optimize for females, has been the political and cultural project of our time. Of course feminists want more. What narcissistic, self-indulgent power group doesn’t?
Ms. Barclay completely fails to address the "feelings over facts" dichotomy that is at the heart of the issue. Of course women CAN be rational and most are, but given the different personality traits, women will be more emotional under certain circumstance than men (and it's proven they broadly are.. all the psych literature confirms it) LOOK IT UP. the Somme example is silly. Generals always draw lessons from such events and they are rarely repeated (though may be mirrored under different circumstances) Ms. Barclay also doesn't adequately address how the Title IX "guidelines" completely upended the innocent prior to proven guilty part. She conveniently fails to address how the "Me Too" movement went way too far the other way, and this was observed by a large group of French women who raised their eyebrows and even wrote about it. Does Ms. Barclay believe that that the feminists in the Anglosphere (US/UK/Australia) are "better educated" about such things than women elsewhere? Ms. Barclay's final claim about "undervalued" occupations is more trope nonsense which avoids the key economic question of supply and demand. "Undervalued" jobs are jobs where supply outstrips demand, and clearly there is a paucity of a particular skillset which drives the supply/demand equation. We're back to the old canard that "teachers are more valuable" than professional athletes or that female pro athletes "deserve" the exact same pay as male pro athletes. Not in the economic sense they don't, and simple economics is what drives salaries and earnings and out entire lives in almost every society. And now we are again BACK to the "feelings over facts" where Ms Barclay proves the point by suggesting that certain (female dominated) jobs are "undervalued". In market economics, thing which are overvalued or undervalued rarely stay that way for any prolonged length of time as entrepreneurs (or simple arbitrage in financial markets) will "fix" the valuation. Her claim isn't underwritten by any facts, it's simply her 'feeling(s)".