Certain essays can define how you see an issue or a time. Jeanne Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards" helped change the way a generation of people thought about foreign policy, setting the stage for the Reagan era. Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" set the intellectual stage for the 1990s post-communism vacation from history. The stakes of the 2016 election were laid bare in The Flight 93 Election.
Helen Andrews' short essay in Compact Magazine has already sparked a debate that may help define the ideological challenge of the second half of the 2020s.
Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten. https://t.co/6R9wwGvUVh
— Helen Andrews (@herandrews) October 16, 2025
The battle between the "woke" and their opponents has dominated our politics since the late Obama era, at least. It is easy to see that beneath the woke ideology is a streak of cultural Marxism, but knowing this does not explain why woke ideology has come to dominate our key institutions.
Seeing the cultural Marxist roots of woke tells you the "what," and Andrews argues that The Great Feminization explains the "why" woke has become so strong. It also warns us that our gains in fighting woke may be temporary because the "why" behind the "what" is still going strong.
Andrews' thesis is simple: "woke" has become so powerful because our institutions have become feminized, and women have different values than men.
Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior 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 feminization 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 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent 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 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.
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 percent. 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 prioritizing 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 Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.
The decline of universities corresponds nicely with this thesis. Higher education is now a feminine pursuit, openly hostile to males and masculinity. Corporate America has feminized, and if you think of the recent corporate disasters at Disney, Bud Light, and Cracker Barrel, a consistent theme develops.
Men are allowed, as long as they are emasculated.
Parents should be avoiding Disney World vacations.
— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) September 13, 2025
This is not this Disney World you visited as a child.
Meet the new Disney “Princess”.
pic.twitter.com/EpDpi4OltL
Not all men fit the masculine stereotype, just as not all women fit the feminine. But as classes, men and women think fundmentally differently and act very differently in groups.
Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Weiss once asked a colleague at the Times opinion desk to get coffee with her. This journalist, a biracial woman who wrote frequently about race, refused to meet. This was a failure to meet the standards of basic professionalism, obviously. It was also very feminine.
Men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women, and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalize. Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminized, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a public health emergency.
One book that helped me put the pieces together was Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes by psychology professor Joyce Benenson. She theorizes that men developed group dynamics optimized for war, while women developed group dynamics optimized for protecting their offspring. These habits, formed in the mists of prehistory, explain why experimenters in a modern psychology lab, in a study that Benenson cites, observed that a group of men given a task will “jockey for talking time, disagree loudly,” and then “cheerfully relay a solution to the experimenter.” A group of women given the same task will “politely inquire about one another’s personal backgrounds and relationships … accompanied by much eye contact, smiling, and turn-taking,” and pay “little attention to the task that the experimenter presented.”
It's not that men are aggressive and women not--men can work collaboratively just fine, and women can be at least as aggressive as men. But generally speaking, men work collaboratively in a different way than women, and women's aggression is more likely to manifest as exclusion from an in-group. Andrews argues that "cancellation" is extremely feminine.
he threat posed by wokeness can be large or small depending on the industry. It’s sad that English departments are all feminized now, but most people’s daily lives are unaffected by it. Other fields matter more. You might not be a journalist, but you live in a country where what gets written in The New York Times determines what is publicly accepted as the truth. If the Times becomes a place where in-group consensus can suppress unpopular facts (more so than it already does), that affects every citizen.
The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female. The rule of law is not just about writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.
A feminized legal system might resemble the Title IX courts for sexual assault on college campuses established in 2011 under President Obama. These proceedings were governed by written rules and so technically could be said to operate under the rule of law. But they lacked many of the safeguards that our legal system holds sacred, such as the right to confront your accuser, the right to know what crime you are accused of, and the fundamental concept that guilt should depend on objective circumstances knowable by both parties, not in how one party feels about an act in retrospect. These protections were abolished because the people who made these rules sympathized with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.
These two approaches to the law clashed vividly in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.
There is much more to Andrews' essay, and best of all, it is relatively short.
I also recommend Andrews's speech at the National Conservatism conference.
The problem isn't that women are in positions of power. It's that power dynamics in America are now feminized.
I described the 2024 election as the testosterone vs estrogen election. I was more right than I thought.
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