The libertarian economist Tyler Cowan 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. And there were only seven
revolutions on this list because this
was 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 parody. 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, 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 Dour wrote his famous or I should
say notorious memo for Google arguing
that female under representation 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 co-workers feel
bad. Or consider the Kavanaaugh
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
Kavanaaugh hearings played out. In fact,
the very best book on the Kavanaaugh
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 be,
you know, 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, are out. Not feminine.
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 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 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.
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.
