The Great Feminization
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
n 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.
The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 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’s resignation.
The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled 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 insistent 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.
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. 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 ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten 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.
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.
Ross Douthat described this line of thinking in an interview this year with Jonathan Keeperman, a.k.a. “L0m3z,” a right-wing publisher who helped popularize the term “the longhouse” as a metaphor for feminization. “Men are complaining that women are oppressing them. Isn’t the longhouse 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?”
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Women have never had more power.
Yet they've never been more unhappy. Their mental health issues, particularly young, single liberal ones are skyrocketing. They want to leave the country whose society they are reengineering. By the numbers, the more they achieve, the less happy and more mental health issues they have.
More Stepford wives is not the answer to what is good for this world.
oh dear, it sounds like somebody is very angry that sunday attendance in the mackerel snapper madrasas, that promote and reinforce the 2nd class status of women, is evaporating and it's slim pickings for celibates in the sunday school classes.
Riiiight.
Because those are the only two options. *eyeroll*
The take over the University by women is not new:
The outdated trope of women being powerless and having no options has never been more ignorant or impossible to square with reality. Recognizing that and its effects on our culture is the first step to dealing with the issues that have arisen, such as young women's mental health problems. And the ongoing denigration of women, often by liberal men, who choose to be mothers and make their families their focus makes matters worse. No matter what progressives say, there's nothing wrong or demeaning about being a homemaker if that is a woman's choice.
Oh, then what do YOU think the problem is, why so many, especially younger women, want to leave the country when they have so many great opportunities?
Unrealistic expectations, driven by well-intended liars.
I saw a podcast recently where the psychologist being interviewed was talking about something like this and mentioned Taylor Swift as an example. She has far, far, far more wealth and power than most people ever dream of, yet still manages to convince herself she's the victim.
IMO I would think that a lot of women would resent your suggestion. Perhaps some of NT's women will comment.
There are only 3 remaining I believe.
I don't know what one of our last remaining Texans thinks the problem is, but if I may interject, I think teaching young women that young masculine men were obsolete was a mistake.
Look how it turned out for them:
They were nothing but pawns for the left.
Sounds like your president.
I'm sure some will. That's kinda the point of the article.
They are the left. Look at who voted for the NYC mayor.
Look at the ethos of the left. Everything is built around the way women socialize and interact.
Membership in the group is more important than individual achievement. Feelings are more important than facts. Validation is more important than respect. Accountability is a threat.
None of that works in men only environments.
He's your president, too. Unless you emigrated over the weekend.
... the current maga mantra.
You probably think the Trump administration is full of people who got there solely on merit.
I can think of 6. None have commented, but maybe for good reason..
Ahh. You're doing that thing where you can't actually refute what I'm saying so you pretend I must think something I don't.
Six regulars on this site?
Five active posters and one who recently has only been posting votes up. I won't post names here but will send a PN with them.
Ok Buzz.
Reality was never part of the movement.
I miss the time of the quiet yet strong woman. So many have been replaced with radical karens.
I miss presidents that werent pathological liars and delusional authoritarians.
I miss the times when republicans were patriotic and helped preserve, protect, and defend the constitution.
I miss the times when democrats represented the working class and not the worthless drug abusing takers.
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The pretzel logic used to get here is so on track, it's hilarious. I couldn't get through much of the article... I can't be belly laughing in the office all morning. The fantastical fantasy that the problems we experience today are a result of empowering women and everything was happier, more stable and/or better when women were subjegated is redickiclus.
Let's pretend for a minute this is true and we need to clamp down on women empowerment...
Let's start with Congress, the Trump Cabinet, the SCotUS and State Houses. Then could move on to publicly traded companies with female board members and executives. Let's get manly and cancel them all before they can cancel us... hahahaha so stupid.
I didn't originally see this was written by a woman... Shouldn't MAGA tell Helen to shut her piehole and fetch them another Coors Light? ...oh wait MAGA canceled Coors Light a couple of years ago... HAHAHAHA!
coors is a corporate sponsor of the heritage foundation and project 2025 ...
What would free speech without a cohesive society be? Constant chaos.
What a load of crap wrapped in a pseudo-intellectual facade of unsupported assertions.
To wit:
I asked chatGPT to evaluate this claim and give a bibliography so anyone could check out the results.
I'm with you 100% on this. In my Toronto law firm where I was the senior partner the woman lawyer was an absolutely great lawyer, competent, smart, trustworthy, ethical and fair. While I was living in Zhengzou, and then Chengdu, my doctors were women, who really knew their stuff and I had the best of health care because of it. My wife grew up on a farm and is the best farmer I have ever known. She grows fabulous vegetables on her two-acre plot near the mountains a half hour walk from where we live, She has wandered through a wild field for half an hour to come back with enough edible greens for a meal for us both. And Jane Austen is the best author I've ever read. To top it off with American politics, I was present in Dallas for a speech by Texas Governor Ann Richards, and I was so impressed I would have campaigned for her if I could have, and IMO Liz Cheney was the most principled politician in America with such rare integrity that she sacrificed her career by putting principle above party loyalty and IMO would as PotUS bring world wide respect BACK to the USA, which Trump has squandered. Now I expect someone to reply that her responsibility was to represent her electorate, which she did not do. To that I say it was her electorate who were fools.
. 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
That's exactly the issue. This is the MO of progressive judges and it's a recipe for chaos. Whether it's women driving progressives towards it,or women being progressives because that's an acceptable way to approach the law is an open question i think. See Obama and his demand for empathy from judges and siding with the powerless instead of the powerful. The role of judges is to side with the side that has the winning argument, powerful or powerless...
Obama claiming a judge should use "one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.… [I]n those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart." is complete nonsense. Might as well get rid of law schools altogether and decide cases by feelings instead of the rule of law.