The Great Feminization

Some will scoff at the focus piece and add that it’s high time anyway we had an honest discussion about white patriarchy. Others will cite the article’s central Great Feminization Thesis as a root cause of America's decline, nodding Whud I tell you?

The thesis: we are in the midst of a cultural revolution marked by the rise of women in virtually every sector of society and which has been a large factor in the rise of wokeism, cancel culture, and the primacy of emotion over logic (click: The Great Feminization).

Discuss.

The numbers are just the beginning of the story. While there may have been many societies that have been feminist to one degree or another, there has never been one in which women hold as much political power as they do today. No parliament, no legislature in any country in any century has reached the level of one-third female, as has ours (the numbers throughout are sourced from the article, all subject to fact checking).

Women are now leading police departments; law schools and medical schools are now majority female; women earn a majority of BAS and Phds; college faculty are majority female; women make up 46% of the managers overall and a majority of those with a college degree. Entire professions have been reconstituted such as psychology where men, once having dominated the profession at 70%, have largely evacuated the practice as the young cohorts now represent a mere 20%.

The speed of the dynamic is breathtaking, relative to the slow pace before the 80s e.g. the first woman on the Supreme Court was appointed in 1981 and with the court now at 5-4 (male), likely to flip female, all of this occurring in the space of 50 years. Today women are 33% of the judges in America (and 63% of the judges appointed by Biden).

The meat of our discussion goes to the author’s submission that it threatens to undermine the long-term functioning of a culture. The issue goes not to differences in talent as such but to the differing modes of interaction. She (yes, the author is a she) cites a psychology professor to advance the theory that men developed group dynamics optimized for war, while women optimized for the protection of offspring. One important difference in their group dynamics is in their respective attitudes towards conflict.

A result is the very different lens through which men and women see the world: women are driven by the ethics of caring and empathy; men by the ethics of logic and justice. These differences play out and are often at odds with each other. Two-thirds of men would cite free speech as a foremost principle, for example, while women in equal percentages would prioritize the preservation of an inclusive society.

Once the gender balance reaches a “tipping point,” an organization as a whole becomes fundamentally skewed to value different things like empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition and hierarchy. The consequence may be less significant in, say, a feminized English department where daily lives are largely unaffected.

They become greater in fields like journalism where in-group consensus can suppress unpopular facts. The New York Times staff, now having become majority female, has been compromised in ways the parting shot by Bari Weiss made clear in her resignation letter. In the corporate world, we might share any personal anecdotes about the way HR departments have assumed ever-greater power with a resulting emphasis on bureaucracy over risk taking. Similarly affected is the academic world where the uncompromising search and transmission of truth would seem to be paramount.

But it’s in the application of the rule of law where the differences have the greatest societal impact i.e. a functioning legal structure is dependent upon a commitment to objectivity and clear rules (e.g.border enforcement) even when those rules yield an outcome that may not be “nice.”

And so we gather here not to argue so much as to simply observe and discuss. Treat the above as a mere point of view.

Peace.

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