The feminization of everything
There’s been a lot of buzz about this article. An excerpt:
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.
Not everything. Many cultures have some form of shunning and some institutions have some type of ostracizing process, and both men and women participate. But I think there’s little doubt that women – and the fact that women now form the majority in so many fields in which that previously wasn’t the case – are key in the process. In particular, women tend to initiate canceling for petty reasons or idiosyncratic personal reasons. Yes, “mean girls” are a thing, and so are mean women.
Initially, when women were a minority in so many professions, women played by men’s rules. But, helped greatly by affirmative action and DEA, once they’ve become majorities or close to majorities the rules change more to women’s rules. I’m a women (I”m even a heterosexual woman, of all things) but I’ve noticed the problem with women’s workplaces for a long time and I’ve had my own difficulties in some of those environments; I’ve been targeted, and my sense is that it’s because of my unwillingness to play by those women’s rules.
I say I noticed the problem in workplaces. But actually, the first time I noticed the problem was in an all-female summer camp. When I was about ten years old and in a cabin with other girls for two entire months, they tried to pick on me. I had grown up in a harsher, more male environment than they, and so I fought back and they left me alone after that. But there was a more gentle soul among my cabinmates who became their natural target. Her persecution by them was an awful thing to watch, and I spent as much time as I possibly could elsewhere. I even tried to coach her in defying them. But she never could summon up the requisite defiance – she cared too much – and so finally I blew the whistle on them and told the higher-ups.
So I suppose I’ve long thought it’s obvious that female-dominated professions will have the problems inherent in female groups. It’s not that male groups don’t have problems – they certainly do – but they’re different problems.
In addition, it’s not just that we now have so many female-dominated groups, it’s that the females in them so often ascribe to leftism and its propensity to get rid of opposing points of view.
The essay goes on to track the process by which different professions became female-dominant. Law school, for example, something to which I can attest. When I entered law school my class was seven percent female, but within just a few years entering classes were nearly 50/50.
From the essay:
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.
It’s not so much women who are valuing feelings over rules – it’s leftist women. I think that’s quite clear if you look at judges. I’m not sure which is more important – the “women” part or the “leftist” part. I suspect they’re intertwined, as women are more likely than men to vote on the left these days. But I really don’t see any difference in the decisions of leftist female judges and leftist male judges.
NOTE: The author begins with a discussion of how Larry Summers lost his position as Harvard president back in 2005. I wrote on that at the time it happened, in this post.
On a personal note – you know why I originally put up a picture of myself on the blog? Because when I was first blogging and didn’t have a photo on the website, everyone assumed I was a man.
“……It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers?out of unorthodoxy.”
George Orwell
Neo: according to Justice Jackson, you must be a biologist because you know that you are a woman.
Anybody notice that when you hear about the WNBA, it’s almost never about basketball, but about personal rivalries amongst the players or some player trashing another.
Cheerleaders have always terrified me. For some it may be clowns, but for me it’s cheerleaders.
Even as an adult, if I’m in a group situation and a Cheerleader comes for me, with those slitted eyes, I know I’m doomed!
I wonder if now we also see a different approach to the law itself at law schools by female instructors. Justice Kagan’s “wise Latina” remark that should have had a lot more said about it during her confirmation process really made me cringe, but Justice Jackson is clearly far out of her depth regardless of her personal views.
Repost of what I wrote on the open thread:
Fascinating article. Kinda opened my eyes more to what I saw happening in academia. As the college I worked at became majority women faculty since the turn of the century, all those changes occurred. I remember one of the old male faculty bemoaning the “gynocracy” that had taken over the school. Sounded crass then, but he was on to something. Now the school from the president, through the administration and the faculty are more a super majority female. And of course the student body is way beyond the 60/40 national average. And the school continues to slide even further leftward while its financial situation continues to deteriorate.
Well, the “wise Latina” was Sotomayor, not Kagan.
Both of my daughters have had bad experiences in all-female work environments. Some mean girls never grow up.
I had an interesting discussion about this article with my very Type A husband. He agrees with it, especially the part about HR taking over business decisions, usually to the detriment of making money and achieving goals. About the only way I resemble the “average” woman is being more risk-averse than my husband.
Physicsguy, I don’t know if my undergraduate small college is suffering financially, but it certainly continues to be intentionally “woke.”
But I always thought that women were the “nurturers.”
No, it turns out that the feminist movement has brought out the worst in females. They know they’re not physically superior to males on the playing fields or the battlefields, so their tactics are aimed at the use of subversion, shunning, taunting, smearing, and other “soft” attacks that, like jackals clinging to a lamb, can bring down those who don’t have Rino-thick hides and quick wits.
My wife spent so many years of our marriage being alone while I was on deployments, or on airline layovers. She needed to be tough, independent, and competent. Yet, when I retired, she was ready to hand over the reins to me and let me be a fulltime husband. She never wanted to be a man or do man’s work. She did it out of necessity.
It seems like many women today have been told they can do anything, be anything, achieve anything, and have it ALL. But the truth is, only a few can actually do that and then not well. IMO, life works best when men and women can collaborate, be partners, and have realistic goals. We were meant to complement each other. And most of us will not be the best at anything, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try.
I hope Charlie Kirk’s message gets much stronger and more acceptance. Get married, have kids, work hard, have a spiritual life, and love this country. I hope a lot of young men and women find that appealing.
IMO, it could solve some of our problems.
“to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” Helen Andrews
Were that to eventuate, the natural result of the extinction of the rule of law is the return of ‘might makes right’. A circumstance that the ‘liberation’ of women would not survive. The only force keeping the rule of law viable is the right, which ironically is the left’s primary bulwark against them reaping the fate they so richly deserve. The irony is literally biblical, as is the left’s cluelessness.
Just as evil sows the seeds of its own destruction, those who champion societal feminization, are and will reap the consequences of their denial of reality.
“I regret belittling men; at 63, I’ve ended up alone”
Behind paywall, MSN has it at this link:
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/other/i-regret-belittling-men-at-63-i-ve-ended-up-alone/ss-AA1O4N69?cvid=68f2cfff76db45edbbaf1f367fad6d1d&ocid=hpmsn
Sargon of Akkad, aka Carl Benjamin opines upon it; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8wQws7vShc
G K Chesterton said most of this well over a century ago.
While I hope Winsome Sears wins the Virginia governorship, we Republicans should stop playing the lefts game. Trump and Vance, two white Alpha male types won the Presidency.
The good thing about Vance is he is Alpha Male but more refined than Trump.
As for Winsome Sears. She is not your average female. She was a U.S. Marine.
I came across an old girl friend on Facebook a few years back. She was on the cusp of sixty and much to my surprise, had never married or had kids. She told me she had been “sold a bill of goods” and if she had her life to live over she would have been a stay at home mom with a house full of kids.
I made me so sad.
Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
Yes, neo, I bristled at that generalization too. I’m an ex-leftist. Don’t we get any credit? 🙂
As I read feminist history, second-wave feminism emerged from the collision of first-wave feminism with the left.
Third-wave feminism emerged when black feminists demanded recognition of race in white-dominated second-wave feminism.
Intersectionalism elaborated third-wave feminism further, blending influences from queer theory, postcolonial thought, and pop culture.
Meanwhile leftist/black politics was evolving into woke. Woke and third-wave feminism mutually influenced each other.
And voila! Here we are. Now we call the whole bag “woke.”
It’s messy but that’s how these things work.
The author’s analysis of the problem of majority women in the legal profession is extremely troubling and applies to academia and the ‘search for truth’ as well. But the thing that struck me most was the author describing the difference in how men and women handle criticism. Specifically, that women have to ‘cushion’ any criticism in layers of compliments and various types of affirmations. Too true.
OMG! What a time waster!
I have women friends but this is exactly why I prefer to spend time with them one on one and I don’t hang out with them in groups. The more women there are the more of this goes on, sincere or not. Boring!
Can’t imagine what it’s done to productivity in the current workplace. Talk about sand in the gears…
@ Molly Brown: “Can’t imagine what it’s done to productivity in the current workplace. Talk about sand in the gears…”
If economic growth is a combination of number of people in the workforce and the productivity of those people, then it would appear an individual woman can improve the economy either by becoming significantly more productive personally, or have more that 2.1 children so the population of potential workers grows beyond straight replacement.
Maybe some of those ideas about “imputed income” for the work that home makers do should get more attention – say as income deductions for family expenses (or for some social expenses) avoided, or some calculation of equivalent income for performing a variety of jobs around the house.
Except staying in a lower tax bracket seems somewhat of a reward, too. But supposedly families now need a dual income to “survive” or prosper with a quality of life to which they have been propagandized. Is this real, or is there a gap in frugality or realistic expectations involved here?
And speaking of frugality: the other day I was considering the ideas behind “poverty levels”, and took a hard nosed conservative position initially: if you don’t have enough money for food, maybe you need to get ride of your expensive cell phone, … etc.
But then I had the thought that perhaps given the nearly essential nature of using a phone to connect with other people and/or with the internet in today’s world, and it thereby being very important in seeking and obtaining a job, maybe (at least for phones) my criticism was misplaced. And something similar could be claimed for having a personal auto in some non-urban non-mass transit locales.
Taking a walk by the playground in the park, I’ve seen feminized little boys, simpering and giggling like little girls. What the fudge? And who introduced the ear-piercing pig-like squealing? Adults wouldn’t have put up with that in the 50s when I was a kid.
P.S. – Get off my lawn!
You fought back, that was the key!
Considering the majority of women lean left, those women often self-select out of the traditional wife and mother role (with the occasional unicorn like ACB), and the impact of affirmative action on hiring, it may be true NAWALT but leftist women are the ones most likely to have a direct impact on the professions and in the workplace.
I read the article and had about the same reaction as Neo and some of the other commenters – yes, woman-dominated groups can be very bullying in demanding conformity. Worse and more damaging than male bullies, sometimes. They are subtler and nastier about it.
My daughter and I are a couple of women who are outliers – we get along very well in mostly male-environments, and are comfortable in a non-romantic way with men generally. Something in the mental wiring, I suppose. I’ve always thought that I reasoned about things in a male way, not a female way. At Sarah Hoyt’s blog-circle, she refers to a lot of her fans, commenters and friends as being “Odds” – the genuinely contrary, non-conformist, eccentric independent thinkers. For some curious reason, a fair number of the female “Odds” are military veterans, or came out of very male-deiminated professional fields.
Subsidized services should be medical care, l/t care, schooling, legal services, and shipping-and-transportation (and only on the margins of the market in the case of the last two).
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We don’t need to be subsidizing people’s grocery purchases, rent, or utility bills. These are predictable regular expenditures of a value which is sensitive to considerations of amenity. The utility of the purchases is not opaque to the consumer. Here, there, and the next place, we could modify land use plans, building codes, landlord-tenant law, and property tax regimes which act to jack up the price of housing. The demand for community food cupboards and soup kitchens is modest enough that private charity can run these operations. If you’re concerned about the real income of the impecunious, various sorts of income transfers should do, provided they can be structured in a way to contain perverse incentives.
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You might also limit the applicability of the federal minimum wage to itinerant employees, employees of the subsidiaries of foreign enterprises, employees of multi-state enterprises, and employees of Delaware corporations and the like. Leave the rest to state regulation. Have the minimum wage be the result of a formula which includes total cash compensation paid to employees in a region in a given year, the estimated population over the age of 14 in said region, time units per year, and a fudge factor as arguments. Prescribe a local rate for off shore territories of the United States and then divvy up the continental United States into a few regions.
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Helen Andrews raises the issue of how anti-discrimination law has implanted a malignancy in the social dynamics of workplaces. IMO, she is correct. Recruitment and promotion in public employment should be regulated by timely examinations not gutted by officious judges and the same might apply to private natural monopolies. Union contracts should be debarred from prescribing that positions be allocated per applicants’ ascribed group. Certain activities in workplaces which map to common crimes like extortion and harassment might be deemed tortious, with particular individuals liable generally and supervisors, managers, and the corporation now and again. Certain types of employer might be compelled to annual disclose data on the demographics of their work force. Otherwise, leave employers alone.
My experience of female dominated workplaces is that they tend not to be goal-oriented, meetings tend to be too frequent and elaborate, decisions are made to manage office politics, and managers tend to be multi-directional placators or bizarro pseudo-disciplinarians. YMMV.
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Some years ago, I saw an article (it was in Forbes or Fortune) on the subject of publicly-traded firms who had a woman among their founders. At the time there were about 6,000 publicly-traded firms in the country and they managed to locate 38 firms on which they could write profiles. (Unless my memory is failing me, those were all the firms they could identify which met their criteria).
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Feminism, like the Peter Principle and Murphy’s Law has a short form and a long form definition. The short form is ‘the habit of looking at human relations with the assumption that women have options and men have obligations’. Elements of the long form would be that men are defective women and that there is nothing that men do well. There might be things men are observed to excel at in comparison to women, but only because they have formed a cartel to lock out women. What are men for? Gloria Steinem’s response ca. 1970 was the fish-and-bicycle metaphor which said men were useless to women. (Steinem’s actual personal behavior suggested she saw men as useful for transient amusement and professional advancement). Very few people believe this, but the law as composed by our odious appellate judiciary incorporates these assumptions.
Several years ago, there was a blog discussion of Conformity, with several people making the assertion that women are generally more conformist than men. One woman remarked that “we (women) are the mobile gender.” She went on to say that throughout most of history and prehistory, women were subject to being captured in raids by other tribes, and that they’d darned well better quickly learn how to fit into the new tribe if they wanted to survive.
OTOH, in fairness it should be note that many of the people who have shown most courage in speaking out against cancel culture and its depredations are in fact women.
OTOH, in fairness it should be note that many of the people who have shown most courage in speaking out against cancel culture and its depredations are in fact women.
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IMO, the professoriate is a collecting pool of other-directed people and people not on board with the abuses and corruption lack nerve and loyalty to each other. One is always grateful for dissenters, but there aren’t many of them of either sex.
My mother was daughter of a daughter of a woman (great-grandmother) born in Ireland who made the perilous journey across the Atlantic to America as a child, who was the youngest of 11 children, who had 2 brothers KIA (and a third seriously wounded) in the Civil War fighting for the Union, whose husband (great-grandfather, also born in Ireland, God rest him) was WIA and permanently crippled fighting for the Union, and . . . who lived to her 99th year. I didn’t know her personally, but I heard lots of stories, and I saw the influence of what it meant to be an Irish woman on grandma and mom (God rest them both). They were tough as nails to the point of sometimes being a bit scary. When I was a kid I never thought of my mother and her mother as the nurturing type. But with the passage of years . . . I look back on the time, e.g., when I told her I was going to quit football because I couldn’t “take it” anymore. Her very firm uncompromising response: “Be a man. You get back out there. You aren’t going to quit.”
As I said: kind of scary. But I got back out there. I didn’t quit. I got to be pretty good, too. And now I realize that she provided the best nurturing a boy could ever want . . . or need.
She was a fierce one, sure. Love you, mom.
Sgt. Mom, et al.
Did you have a close relationship with your father?
All the ‘Odds’ I know were close companions with their dad growing up. I think that’s how we became the ‘Thinks like a man’ type.
Involved fathers are just as important to balanced psychological development for girls as they are for boys. Is it fair to say the ultimate ‘feminization’ of the culture is single motherhood?
I bless my dad every day for what he did for me.
Molly – I was close with both of my parents, growing up. Dad was very involved, although he worked, and my mother was ostensibly stay-at-home (she was very into volunteering, and my sibs and I used to say that she might as well have had a job, for all the hours that she spent volunteering (PTA, church, scouts, etc.) The one thing that made a difference, I believe – was that Dad expected the same from me and my sister, as they did from my brothers, which was academic excellence, and being a responsible and reliable person.
In the name of de-hierarchicalization, a lot of companies have established organization structures in which decision-making is very diffuse, and getting anything done requires extensive social-navigation skills. These may actually be found more commonly in women than in men.
Those who liked Helen Andrews’s article might want to take a look at this video of a talk she gave at the National Conservatism conference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWLbq7PlrIA
Andrews argues that the feminization of law may lead to civilizational collapse. For many years, I’ve been saying the same thing about the sciences, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating. I just hope I don’t live to see it.
It struck me how Ruth Bader Ginsburg would rule based on the societal implications of a case, and would complain against those implications when others ruled based on the law.
Scalia was much the opposite, and lefties I talked with about Supreme Court justices assumed that Scalia behaved as RBG did, and didn’t seem to be aware that she did.
Tim, “lefties I talked with about Supreme Court justices assumed that Scalia behaved as RBG did, and didn’t seem to be aware that she did.”
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What an example of bias affecting what one sees.
Kind of frightening!
Jon baker on October 18, 2025 at 8:49 pm said:
While I hope Winsome Sears wins the Virginia governorship, we Republicans should stop playing the lefts game. Trump and Vance, two white Alpha male types won the Presidency.
Note that the woman who wrote the thesis Neo posted above explicitly states the issue isn’t individual women. Rather it is what happens when an institution is controlled by a majority of women. It’s a statistical issue, not about individuals.
I’ve never been in a situation where the management was primarily female.
My experience has been other wise; social justice and peacemaking committees, discussion groups, groups deciding which or whether to take a stand on something or other.
Liberal/left women are particularly devoid of facts involved in whatever it is. When facts are presented, blank looks follow. Nothing changes. No discussion of disproportionate cost, impassable obstacles, or certain negative results makes any difference. It’s “I just feel that….” or “I just think that….”.
To a certain extent, this makes no difference if all we’re doing is discussing something. But it carries over to actions taken or recommended.
Why? It’s been said, possibly here and certainly elsewhere, that middle class women rarely have to make difficult decisions which might be distasteful. Or at least make them feel bad. Because those views–not decisions–rarely result in objective action. So there’s no penalty for getting it wrong.
And where there are actual results, the women are insulated from most likely negative consequences. Sure…but property taxes go up every year anyway. What’s the connection?
Or others pay the price; the people assaulted or killed because a revolving door judge lets assailants walk are not likely in the orbit of the middle class woman who voted for the judge because, “I just feel….”. Could be first responders. People on the edge of poverty facing new zoning or housing codes. Could be soldiers. A municipal project to improve traffic flow and reduce accidents has to be put on hold while a bike path is built.
Not only is this, i submit, true of them, it’s part of the subculture in which they were raised.
So…how such women are on the city council, the school board. The church governing body, whatever that may be. Without the personal or cultural experience of paying for or seeing someone else paying for “I just feel….”
Should say my wife and daughter are not like that. Given various life experiences.
Richard Aubrey:
But the woman of whom you speak DO have to make difficult decisions, with consequences, in the personal realm. Decisions about whom to marry, whether to have children, and how to raise children, have major personal in-your-face consequences.
Political decisions may indeed be more removed in their consequences, but that’s not just limited to women.
Liberal/left women are particularly devoid of facts involved in whatever it is. When facts are presented, blank looks follow. Nothing changes. No discussion of disproportionate cost, impassable obstacles, or certain negative results makes any difference. It’s “I just feel that….” or “I just think that….”.
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I’ve seen the phenomenon in fora like this. I’ve also seen it at home, though it takes the form of various evasion drills and contrived confusion.
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I’m reminded of an art historian and curator with whom I was once acquainted. Over twenty five years, she has been employed by five institutions and has recently been hired by a sixth. She can be exceedingly charming, even enchanting. I usually dealt with her secretary. As far as I could see, her staff thought well of her. She was a staff curator at a big honking important museum in New York, then a director of a succession of college art galleries, and then the director of one consequential cultural institution with a two digit staff followed by one with a three digit staff. She’s now back to running a college gallery (at a place with a lower enrollment and less selective admissions than the previous places she worked. You could say that she’s had a career crash at the age of 55. Her departure from her previous place of employment was abrupt, with her begging off questions posed by the local arts media and the chairman of the board uttering pleasant things about her. Her departure from her previous position was decorated with denunciation (to the board and the media) from professional employees leaving in disgust.
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My own wager about her career arc from a distance is that she made a satisfactory supervisor but a crummy manager. On the eve of getting the heave-ho from one position, she answered question of the local media and spoke of how she was pleased to have made the organization less hierarchical and give everyone a chance to be heard.
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She was interviewed twenty years ago and in the course of it the interviewer asked some question (the precise wording of which was decorous but which I cannot remember) to which the reply was ‘I haven’t met that person yet’. In the intervening twenty years, she still hasn’t met that person.
Neo,
Given your exceptions, the consequences are more obviously obvious and in-your-face to outsiders.
It is hard to imagine anything short of a felony in child-rearing which would not garner approval or at least neutrality from at least a third of those who know about it.
And the result….the variables from within the family, the gene pool and the outside world are so varied that rationalization is hardly necessary. Besides, you did the same thing to the older kid and nothing happened…..
But, as Einstein said, everything is relative. The theory I’m referring to presumes that men are more likely to be in a world where a bad decision will bite you or somebody else and in the latter case you’ll know about it. My father said, of his WW II service, that if he’d known what having a commission meant he’d have avoided it. That’s an extreme example, but various employment situations likely provide more immediate feedback in men’s slots than in women’s. Or just growing up. Differently.
A guy running an excavator thinks he can get one more load without hitting the pipe, so he takes the chance. Win-lose, how many times to other people, most including women for purposes of this discussion, have such consequences for getting it wrong, while under pressure, to continue the metaphor–to get that hole dug?
Tagging along behind, but there is a book very relevant to this discussion, which I found very helpful some years ago in explaining why I didn’t talk like, or act like, “most” women (and earlier most girls), why that was normal but unusual, and how to “translate” from female to male perspectives and vice versa.
Highly recommended. She wrote some later books that were also helpful, but not as seminal as this one.
“You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” by Deborah Tannen.