The Great Feminisation

Woke began the day, 20 years ago, when Larry Summers was forced out of Harvard for saying there are innate differences between men and women, argues Helen Andrews in Compact. His cancellation was feminine, because all cancellations are feminine – and the rise of wokery is synonymous with the Great Feminisation as women become majorities in Western workplaces. Here’s an excerpt.

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.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14th 2005, at a conference on ‘Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce’, Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to “different availability of aptitude at the high end” as well as taste differences between men and women “not attributable to socialisation”. Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers’s resignation.

The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria. 

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 organisation or field. That is the Great Feminisation thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminisation.

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 behaviour applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminisation as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981). 

A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5% of judges were female. Today women are 33% of the judges in America and 63% of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden. 

The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a 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. In 1974, only 10% of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55%. 

Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46%. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

The substance fits, too. Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritising the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminisation thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminisation’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71% of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59% of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of 10 random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of 10 men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favour consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracise their enemies.

Worth reading in full.