Original talk by Helen Andrews.
Transcript:
The libertarian economist Tyler Cowen once wrote a blog post describing all of the revolutions he's seen in the course of his lifetime, starting with the moon landing when he was a little boy and going up chronologically to today's advent of AI. There were only seven revolutions on this list because this included only the greatest and most earthshaking ones. And right there between the fall of communism and the invention of the internet was something called the great feminization.
That is not a phrase that a lot of Americans know, but future historians may well rank it as having greater importance than almost any other revolution on that list.
The great feminization is very easy to define. It refers to the increasing representation of women in all of the institutions of our society. But as simple as it is to define, it's very difficult for those of us on the other side of that revolution to fully grasp its significance.
The first thing that most people fail to understand about it is how unprecedented it is in human history. There have been many societies that have been feminist to one degree or another in which women have been queens and owned businesses and held positions of authority that commanded the respect of men. But there has never been a society in which women hold as much political power as they do today. Think of all of the parliaments that have ever existed. Every legislature in every country in every century. None of them has been, as ours is, one-third female.
The idea of a female chief of police would have seemed very strange even to many early feminists. And yet today, the police department is led by a woman in the largest city in America. And in the city in which we are now standing, law schools today are majority female. Law firm associates are majority female. Medical schools are majority female. Women earn a majority of BAs and PhDs. College faculty are majority female. Women are 46% of the managers in the United States, and the white collar workforce overall—workers with college degrees—a majority of them are women.
These are in many cases very recent developments with the tipping point having occurred only in the last 5 to 10 years, and that is the other common misconception about the great feminization. People tend to think of feminism as something that occurred back in the 1970s, but it took several decades to go from token representation to approximate gender parity. The first woman on the Supreme Court was appointed in 1981, and in that year, women were 5% of the judges in America. Today, there are, of course, four women on the court, one justice away from a female majority, and women are 30% of the judges in America, 40% of the judges in the state of California, and 63% of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden. So, from the first woman on the court to a likely female majority on the Supreme Court is probably going to be a span of about 50 years. And the exact same trajectory over the same timeline can be seen in many other professions. There was a pioneering generation in the 1970s where a woman was often the only female reporter in her newsroom or the only female professor in her department, and then increasing female representation through the '80s and '90s until healthy female representation of about 20 to 30% by the turn of the century. And today, 25 years later, in many of these fields, they are now 40% female or 50/50 gender equal.
And the pendulum may not be done swinging yet. As feminized as we are, we may get more feminized still. Look at the example of the profession of psychology. As recently as 25 years ago, psychology was a predominantly male profession, up to 70% male. Today, the youngest cohort of psychologists just joining the profession is 20% male. Men have evacuated the profession of psychology. And it's easy to understand why. It's because psychology has become feminized. As women increased their representation in the profession, they reoriented the field to be more friendly to their ideas and preferences—to be about caring and empathy and non-judgmentalism. So a man who wanted to become a psychologist because he liked judging other people would naturally choose a different profession.
The same thing has occurred in literary fiction. Some of you may have read in the last 12 months one of several articles in the New York Times about how men don't read novels anymore. And the explanation why, which is very obvious to me, even if it's not obvious to the New York Times, is that the publishing industry is overwhelmingly female, almost 80% female. So men do still like to read novels. They just don't like to read the kinds of novels that today's publishing industry produces.
Some fields are more susceptible to feminization than others. There's very little you can do to feminize the field of math or engineering. But as women join a field in greater numbers, we should expect that any field that can be feminized will be, and the dynamic will play out exactly as it has in psychology. It may be that a 50/50 gender split is not a stable equilibrium.
I have referred several times so far to feminization without defining what that means. I'll have a lot to say about it in just a moment. But if you want to put it in a single sentence, you could say that feminization equals wokeness. Everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
Think about all the things that wokeness means: valuing empathy over rationality, safety over risk, conformity and cohesion over competition and hierarchy. All of these things are privileging the feminine over the masculine. So if you have ever wondered why wokeness appeared out of nowhere when it did, that is my hypothesis—that all of the institutions that began admitting women in the 1970s eventually got enough women that they were able to reorient them.
For example, women are consistently less supportive of free speech than men. In surveys asking which is more important, protecting free speech or preserving an inclusive society, approximately two-thirds of men say free speech and approximately two-thirds of women say inclusive society.
In moral reasoning, the traditional way of phrasing the difference between men and women is to say that women have an ethics of caring and men have an ethics of justice. In making a moral judgment, men will ask, "What are the rules and what are the facts?" Women tend to be more interested in context and relationships.
So, let's apply that to wokeness. When James Damore wrote his famous—or I should say notorious—memo for Google arguing that female underrepresentation in the hard sciences might not be the result of bias and prejudice, no one even attempted to argue that he was wrong on the facts. The reason that he was fired was because the things he had written might make his female coworkers feel bad. Or consider the Kavanaugh hearings. The masculine position was to say that maybe something bad happened to you, but if you do not have evidence, then we can't allow you to ruin a man's life and career over it. The feminine position was to say, "How can you talk about rules of evidence? Can't you see she's crying?" Now, to be clear, many women were revolted by the way the Kavanaugh hearings played out. In fact, the very best book on the Kavanaugh hearings was written by two women, Molly Hemingway and Carrie Severino. But a political system in which men predominate will tend to operate according to rules of facts and objectivity. And one in which women predominate will tend to operate by the rules of emotions and subjective facts, even if there are individual men and women who fall on the opposite side of those camps.
There's a lot more that could be said about sex differences and wokeness, but I'll skip ahead to the controversial part of my argument, because believe it or not, nothing I've said so far has been particularly controversial. So far, I have only made two claims. One, men and women are different. And two, as institutions become more female, they change in predictable ways according to those differences. I think even most people on the left would agree with that.
Feminization is a great example of what Michael Anton calls the celebration parallax, which is a fancy term for anything where you're only allowed to notice something if you think it's a good thing. There are literally thousands of articles out there saying it's great that we have more women judges now because women are more empathetic, or it's good to have more women on corporate boards because that'll make capitalism more humane. It is only when you say women are fundamentally changing the bedrock institutions of our society and that might be bad that you start to get into trouble.
But I have two actually contentious claims today and that is the first of them: that feminization is not just an interesting new development that has had some pluses and minuses. It's that feminization in the case of many important institutions is a bad thing. In a few cases, it is so bad as to threaten the end of civilization.
The rule of law, for example, is a very important thing. It's also very fragile. It requires a deep commitment to objectivity and clear rules, even when those rules yield an outcome that is not nice. I do not want judges who are more interested in context and relationships than in what the law says.
Academia is the one part of our society that's supposed to be about finding and transmitting the truth. If it instead becomes about censoring ideas that are dangerous or threatening, then it no longer serves its purpose.
In business, if the only way to advance at your company is to behave in the most HR compliant way possible, that's going to exclude and discourage the very people who are most likely to be leaders and innovators.
I happen to think that the most important political issue in America today right now is immigration. And that is a perfect example of a political issue where the elite consensus is highly feminized. We have all of these laws on the books about citizenship and borders, but we're not allowed to enforce any of them if it might make somebody sad. So, rule of law, pursuit of truth, borders, innovation—without these things, I am not being hyperbolic when I say that a thoroughly feminized civilization will set itself on the road to collapse. So, that is the first claim: that feminization is in many cases a bad and a threatening thing.
The second claim proceeds from a question, and it's a very important question. Can we have demographic feminization in the literal sense without having substantive feminization of the kind that I believe is so dangerous? That is, can we have more female lawyers and judges and academics without having—or while still maintaining—the old standards? Because in theory, of course, you can imagine such a thing. There certainly are enough women—there certainly are many women who have the talent and the inclination to meet the old standards. There are many women who are excellent judges. I know many female journalists who are just as hard-nosed and uncompromising as any of their male peers. There definitely are such women.
But I am not sure that there are enough of them, because the question is not can some women be excellent professors. The question is: is it possible to have an academia that is majority female and is still as committed to—and still respects—the unhindered pursuit of unpopular truths as much as the old predominantly male academia did? I believe the answer is no. I believe demographic feminization does inevitably lead to substantive feminization. It is a difficult thing to confront but I genuinely believe it to be true.
So what does that imply? What should we do about it? I hasten to make clear that I do not propose to ban women from any field or even to discourage them from pursuing their goals as far as their talents and ambitions will take them. I don't think we have to do anything as crazy as that. The only thing that I propose, and I think all that is necessary to solve the problem, is to take our thumb off the scale, because right now in ways that many people don't quite appreciate, there is a thumb on the scale in favor of women.
The most important example of course is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to have too few women employed at your company. If women are statistically underrepresented in your institution, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, companies and institutions give jobs to women that they would not otherwise have gotten, give women promotions that they would not have otherwise gotten, and in a pinch, they create jobs that did not need to exist, involving PowerPoint slides, just to get their numbers up. This is why HR departments exist and why they promote gender diversity so assiduously—not because they're ideologues, although they are obviously, but because they are protecting their company from lawsuits.
Anti-discrimination law also mandates that the culture of every workplace be feminized because if the atmosphere of your workplace is too brash or competitive or combative, that is also a lawsuit waiting to happen because it is an indication that your workplace is not sufficiently welcoming to women. That is why HR departments are so zealous about policing every interaction and every communication and making sure none of it has any rough edges.
So, that's agenda item number one. Get rid of all the HR ladies. Who's with me? Just fire them and then we'll see how it shakes out. If your company has too few women, that might indicate that you have a problem with your recruiting pipeline. On the other hand, it might not. Either way, we're not going to send a team of lawyers after you to second-guess you. It's funny. HR departments are always so careful about making sure the atmosphere at the workplace is welcoming to women. I wonder if they ever considered that maybe their soggy, conflict-averse, nicy-nice atmosphere might not be welcoming to men.
The other thumb on the scale obviously is the two-income trap. Women pursue careers because they have to for their families to attain a middle class standard of living. If we address that through various other policies to make it possible for families that want to have one earner to do so, I think the problem of feminization will subside on its own as individuals make different choices based on what's best for their own families. That's just my prediction. Maybe I'm wrong. Let's get rid of the two-income trap and give people the choice and then we'll see what happens.
In conclusion, feminization is a sensitive topic. I am acutely aware of the sensitivities because I am of course myself a woman. I very much enjoy being a writer and I would never want to discourage another woman from pursuing the path that I have followed. On the other hand, I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions. So if society becomes more conformist and less welcoming to ideas that are controversial or unpopular, I'm also going to have a hard time of it. The important thing to remember is that it's not about what's best for me personally. It's about what's best for the society I live in and the society my children are going to grow up in. So my final exhortation to all of you is that we should all consider this difficult topic unselfishly, not from the perspective of what's to our individual advantage, but from the perspective of what's best for all of us. Thank you.