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Much brouhaha has been made about Helen Andrews’s Compact essay on “the Great Feminization” of the upper echelons of American society. Arguably, too much brouhaha, and most of it backlash. Andrews’s thesis — that critical masses of female dominance in industries from academia to journalism have resulted in a rigging of the rules away from meritocratic principles and toward pure pathos — does not actually criticize gender parity in the workplace or individual women.
But you wouldn’t know it if you read her critics. The Bulwark published not one but two excoriations of Andrews by Mona Charen and Cathy Young, both of whose primary opposition to Andrews’s piece seems to be that conservative supporters of President Donald Trump publicly lauded it. In a quasi-viral Substack (and a much better faith critique than either of the Bulwark screeds), Kelly Chapman more seriously considers the obvious truths at the basis of Andrews’s argument (“performative sensitivity and draconian, mandated ’empathy’ are known forms of bureaucratic control”), but still, Chapman lambastes Andrews’s “erasure of moral language” and “unspoken assumption that moral judgement is a masculine virtue.” In a tweet viewed almost 41,000 times, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Erika Bachiochi mocked Andrews’s essay as reductive.
“If you want reason to be the effective principle of law — which you ought — you need to recover authentic liberal education and classical legal education,” wrote Bachiochi. “And for that, you need robust intellectual and moral formation in families and schools. As it turns out, *groups of women* dedicated to forming human beings in educational settings especially tend to be rather effective stewards of these truths.”
The grand irony of all the women sneering at Helen Andrews is that they have publicly proven her point.
Let’s start with a couple of caveats here: I really do not know Helen Andrews well at all, and from foreign policy (Andrews is much more in the “New Right,” non-interventionist camp) to economic policy (Andrews skews more protectionist and “National Conservative” whereas I am the Washington Examiner‘s resident Scrooge McDuck), we have about as little ideological overlap as two commentators can have while being both within the mainstream right of center. Most pertinent to this discourse is the fact that I am unabashedly an egalitarian feminist who has repeatedly written that Western capitalism and prosperity are inextricably linked with women’s centuries-long history of labor force participation.
And I basically think Andrews is right, not just for the lengthy merits of her own argument, but also because, unlike her naysayers, I believe women can still succeed on their own merit and without a degradation of objective rules.
It is true that Andrews’s 3,000-word essay does not have the space to expound at length on the other probable factors fueling the rise of what we call “wokeness,” including but not limited to:
- Unfettered illegal immigration and the gaming of global asylum policies, especially in Europe, after the start of the Syrian Civil War
- Social media cannibalizing the real-life socialization of young people and placing usual youthful indiscretions in pursuit of romantic relationships and professional achievement in the Panopticon of social media
- A decade of zero interest policy and quantitative easing that allowed investors to incinerate money on WeWork and The Wing (this was the even more feminist version of WeWork)
- The civilizational breaking point that was the COVID-19 lockdowns and the subsequent jailbreak from said lockdowns under the moralizing guise of the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests (and riots)
But in 3,000 words, Andrews does a pretty decent job laying about the case that while individual women have long succeeded in the corporate ladder and academia without transforming said systems for the worse, “institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.”
What exactly is the “Great Feminization”? As Andrews maintains, “it is not an organic result of women outcompeting men,” but rather a bending of previously objective rules that allow for the cancellation of Larry Summers for offending women with his observation of objective realities, a prioritization of the facade of consensus and cooperation over overt conflict and debate, the allowance of superfluous political opinion in previously apolitical industries (Andrews specifically cites public health officials celebrating BLM protests during lockdowns), and the obliteration of due process seen in campus Title IX tribunals and the baseless crusade against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
Andrews’s argument that female group dynamics corrode the rules of fairness and merit does not mean that the civilizational problem is not the presence of individual or even 50% share of women in a workplace, but rather the rigging of rules. Andrews calls to relax disparate impact protections from anti-discrimination law, but there is nothing in her piece or even obvious in her past writing to indicate she has any opposition to a woman’s individual success in the workplace.
“As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing,” writes Andrews. “Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.”
The real sexism is not coming from Andrews, who has succeeded as a working mother of three children without a scintilla of apology or the all-too-common hypocrisy of too many conservative women who shame fellow working mothers on the Right. Rather, it comes from her critics who seem to have internalized the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Unlike Andrews, who maintains that the tribalism of the Great Feminization, rather than individual women themselves, is why women have monopolized the most economically useless industries in the white collar tier, Mona Charen insists we are biologically destined for human resources.
“On average, women do tend to prefer work that is interpersonal to work that is solitary,” says Charen. “In my 2018 book, Sex Matters, I quoted social scientist Patti Hausman on the question of why more women don’t pursue careers in engineering: ‘Because they don’t want to. Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors, or quarks. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.’ That, and not ‘social engineering’ as Andrews argues, largely accounts for why women now dominate the fields of psychology and human resources. These are free choices of free people.”
I suppose that explains why women aren’t dominating the C-suites of Big Tech, but it doesn’t explain why said HR departments operate more like medieval witch trials, judging on appeals to pathos instead of blind evaluations of evidence.
Chapman says that Andrews’s “fantasy of restoring a bygone hierarchy to the workplace” would necessitate either “treating feminine emotion as a liability” or “lobotomizing all women and suspending them in a vat of testosterone.” The latter is obviously a joke, but treating both solutions as equally improbable insinuates that women are not capable of rationally quelling our worst excesses. If men, who have spent millennia reining in a biological urge to end disagreements with fists and use force to conquer women and children, have come to evolve away from toxic masculinity to the point that the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are considered egregious and criminal outliers, why could or should women not temper our own emotional impulses? We don’t need to be lobotomized, but our supposed biological instinct for an infant’s tears should indeed be left at the door when we step into offices, lest we let women’s tears dominate adulthood.
If anything, the public and increasingly pervasive insistence of women that we cannot compete on our own merit is far more injurious to the just and necessary goal of equality of both sexes. X is replete with examples, but one recent post with 10 million views claims that because of our “shorter circadian rhythms, hormonal cycles, stronger stress responses, and quicker cognitive fatigue,” women aren’t meant to work in nine-to-five jobs.
A more humorous irony about posts like these, often from the same tradwives who decry modern medicine, is that one easy biological hack to bring the monthly fluctuation of hormones to a halt is hormonal birth control. But if you are not enslaved to your delusions of dependence on biology, I imagine that fellow happily working women feel about posts like these the same way successful black Americans feel about racial affirmative action: namely, that it’s wildly bigoted to believe that women and racial minorities cannot succeed on a level playing field.
AS A THEORY OF EVERYTHING, THE ‘GREAT FEMINIZATION’ FALLS SHORT
I’m sure Andrews would quibble with me on some aspects of discrimination law: pregnancy and postpartum-specific firing protections are both important to individual women and systemically insignificant given the limited amount of time the average woman actually needs in the immediate period of childbirth and physical recovery. But broadly speaking, her argument hinges on an assumption of female potential that I consider inherently honest and feminist.
The implicit conclusion of Bachiochi’s criticism is that Andrews would be better off channeling “robust intellectual and moral formation in families and schools” rather than writing a little thinkpiece for public consumption. Andrews might consider me a bit too much of a girlboss feminist for rebutting that with the following, but I say screw that: a woman’s place is in the center of the debate, arguing with facts instead of feelings, and held to the exact same standards as a man.