No, Liberal Feminization Did Not Ruin The Workplace.

By Karen and Erica

Recently, a woman called Helen Andrews published an essay called The Great Feminization, apparently based upon a speech she gave at the National Conservatism conference in September. For some reason, the essay, and Ms. Andrews, have been widely publicized, with, for example, the New York Times asking whether liberal feminization (whatever that is) ruined the workplace.

Ms. Andrews’ essay begins:

In 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.

Given what Mr. Summers had said about women’s intelligence, and given recent revelations that call into question his own, perhaps women had reason to be negative, though Mr. Summers was hardly cancelled in 2019. 

The essay goes on:

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?

All cancellations are feminine? Women just cancel people when there are enough women to do so, because that’s the way they are? Wonder what the analytical basis for that proposition might be? And what was she seeing, exactly?

Then, the really scary part:

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. 

Now, we are lawyers, and we practiced for decades, until about ten years ago. So admittedly we are a little out of the loop, though we still have many friends with whom we speak about the profession–women and men. We have never heard any of our colleagues complaining that the law is overrun with women, or that those women analyze the law by reference to emotion, or that judges let women get away with emotional murder. 

Which would be unlikely. According to the American Bar Association, [t]here were 1,457 sitting federal judges  in the United States as of Aug. 1, 2024, and they were overwhelmingly male (67%) and white (74%). The same source says that, at the same time, 43% of high state court justices were women, which means 57% were men. Perhaps the judiciary is not entirely feminized. Yet. Whew.

Further evidence of feminization:  

Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

We never worked in an environment that felt like a Montessori kindergarten. And we never worked in a place so overrun with women that we could imagine men feeling overwhelmed by the feminization of it all. But of course we sympathize with any men who feel that they are the subject of discrimination because their environments require them to act like pre-schoolers.

Maybe we are biased because we were part of the 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, of which Ms. Andrews writes. We also think one reason women have since been accepted into the workplace is because diverse populations perform better, a proposition as to which there is ample evidence and perhaps could be called feminization. As just one example, McKinsey, which has for years studied the impact of diversity in the business world, says:

The business case for gender diversity on executive teams has more than doubled over the past decade. Each of our reports—2015, 2018, 2020, and now 2023—has found a steady upward trend, tracking ever greater representation of women on executive teams. At each time point we have assessed the data, the likelihood of financial outperformance gap has grown: Our 2015 report found top-quartile companies had a 15 percent greater likelihood of financial outperformance versus their bottom-quartile peers; this year, that figure hits 39 percent.

Women, proudly feminine and stringently analytical, have changed workplaces for the better. Call it feminization if you must. The word we would use is evolution.