Have American Institutions Become Overly Feminized?

Have American institutions become overly feminized? That’s what writer Helen Andrews argued in a September speech to the National Conservatism Conference. The following month, she expanded on the theory in a viral essay for Compact magazine, titled “The Great Feminization.”

According to Andrews, the rise of wokeness and cancel culture can be largely traced to women’s increasing representation in fields such as law, medicine, and psychology. Feminine patterns of behavior favoring cohesion, safety, and ostracization of the enemy, she said, have increasingly taken precedence over principles like the rule of law and the pursuit of truth. And our society has suffered for it.

“Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field,” Andrews writes.

Her argument made waves online, with some critics accusing her of overgeneralizing a complex situation—others, of outright misogyny. Still others argued that Andrews has entirely misdiagnosed the problem. Rather than being overly feminized, the country is “rapidly becoming the manosphere,” argued one Atlantic writer.

Whatever you think of Andrews’ argument, she had clearly touched on something important. And so we wanted to dig a little deeper.

Are women the cause of wokeness? Is their increasing representation in the workplace threatening the health of some of our most important institutions? We posed these questions to seven contributors—women working across medicine, journalism, academia, and more.

Here’s what they had to say.

Leah Libresco Sargeant, author of The Dignity of Dependence and the Other Feminisms Substack:

Helen Andrews’ “Great Feminization” hypothesis would benefit from a little more of the concrete, data-driven analysis that she thinks working women neglect. If she is worried that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” why have industries already dominated by women (pharmacy, veterinary medicine) not collapsed? I choose those industries specifically because their failures should be noisy, producing a visible body count. If women persistently, and perniciously, prioritize “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition,” I’d expect to see visible harms in less politically contentious arenas.