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.
As a feminist, I have to disagree. The feminization described by Andrews is real - and pernicious. It may be true that it is the result of cultural processes rather than any inherent biological characteristics of males and females but it does not change the fact that it has gone too far. Barclay actually contradicts herself, claiming on the one hand that women behave differently in groups from men, and yet insisting that a huge influx of women and of feminine-style behavior into workplace does not change anything. Yes, it does. The most important aspect of this change is the privileging of empathy and moral intuition over logic and ethical reasoning. This behavior is culturally gendered as feminine, and women are socialized to embrace it, to our own detriment. When you are told that "being kind" is more important that being right, you are pushed into an insincere performative ethics that is damaging to society and to your own integrity. Women are not a problem. Femininity is.
This is a swing and a miss.
"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."
The fantastic inference here is that women don't have anger issues... that anger is a uniquely male emotion. Yeah, right. Tell my wife that.
We are talking about evolutionary biology related to gender and associated tendencies and behaviors.
The first concept we have to accept is egoism. There is no real egalitarianism. Those claims are just "good person" virtue signaling backing self-pursuit of ego fulfillment. So, we are all selfish and narcissistic. It is human nature.
Males demonstrate overt narcissism. The reason is that males have the strength and size to kill each other in man-to-man combat. Men signal their anger by thumping their chest, but most also learn that uncontrolled anger results in risk that some other man will take them out in defense of their out-of-control anger. Men often show their anger as a message to other men to leave them alone, but they generally know better than to act on it immediately. They are overt in their display, but they compartmentalize the feelings, so they don't make mistakes in behavior that pose a risk. Their anger might influence their behavior later (like going to war to protect females), but generally in their strategy to win. Men that lack immediate emotional regulation capability are often those in prison or dead from conflict with other men.
Conversely, individual women are less dangerous and more at risk for being killed by men. Women don't display their anger, because it would cause stronger men to respond of the perceived threat. Women hold it in for immediate defense, but they don't generally compartmentalize... it continues to burn and generate a big pile of resentment.
This translates into females having a hidden emotional agenda different from the one they display. Contrast that to males that tend to have one face to make sure others know where they stand at all times.
Females are also less independent and more likely to collect together in a group. Again, this is largely evolutionary as stronger males tended to be the hunter-gather and warrior while the women stayed back with other women to tend the village and raise the children.
Because they are less likely to prevail in direct overt conflict, females have developed other strategies to win. This is where the vulnerable narcissism play of modern feminism has come into play... and along with the tendency of hidden agendas, frankly, has made a big fucking mess of everything.
The key traits are hypersensitivity to criticism (and I expect in response to my comment), victim mentality, entitlement, social anxiety, envy and resentment.
The general problem is the erosion of trust. Female dominated structures and institutions tend to demonstrate this hidden agenda. Female workgroups tend to include much more drama than do male workgroups. Hidden resentments, back-stabbing, character assassination, etc., they are all common behaviors with the female hive. I have been a corporate manager for over 45 years and I have observed this over and over again. The female tendency is to act cooperative but burn with resentment over the slightest slight or criticism and work covertly to undermine the target of their resentment. I can mediate a conflict with female workers and see it keep boiling back up again over and over again. For males, often they slug it out and go get a beer after work.
This difference in emotive behavior that seems to be explained by gender evolutionary biology is why history does not hold a single example of any long-running and significant societal and governmental female dominance.
We are playing with a once in history test to promote females to socioeconomic dominance, and it is not working well at all. Maybe someday in the future our human nature will evolve to accommodate the changes, but today almost everything wrong... this note of so much social and economic chaos... is because we blew through the reasonable goal of early feminism to secure choice for women, to this 3rd wave postmodernist critical theory woke bullshit that is pushed by malcontents to put females in a position of socioeconomic power.
Hey girls, go get married, have babies and make some sandwiches. Or if that does not sound good, go to school, get some professional credential and be a girlboss career woman.
But stop this man-hating, girl-power, raging lunatic, movement to redesign society to fit your lack of emotional regulation capability. It sucks.