We've spent plenty of time discussing wokeness and the ways in which it operates so it may feel like there's nothing new to say about it. But just over a week ago, author Helen Andrews wrote a lengthy article for Compact Magazine arguing that wokeness as a phenomenon can largely be explained as a result of feminization of our culture.
There's a lot to this argument but one of her strongest pieces of evidence is simply the timing:
...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...
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.
As with anything looking at large groups of people, it's important to point out that individuals are unpredictable but groups are less so. An individual woman might be taller than an average man, but if you assemble a group of 100 men and 100 women, chances are extremely high the men will be taller on average. The same is true with how men and women differ psychologically.
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.
Some of this definitely rings true to me. There is an association of wokeness with women in particular that seems hard to ignore. It's no secret that young women are more likely than young men to be left-wing. Here's what Gallup had to say about this last year.
Gallup’s national figures on Americans’ political ideology show the country remains at center-right, with more people identifying as conservative (36%) than liberal (25%) and the rest saying they are moderate (36%). However, the “liberal” percentage has inched up over the past three decades and is currently one percentage point shy of its all-time high...
From 1999 to 2013, about three in 10 women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal, after which the figure rose (a bit unsteadily) to 44% by 2020. The percentage liberal receded slightly to 41% in 2022 and 40% in 2023. The resulting 11-point increase in young women’s liberal identification since 1999 has made what was already the most liberal subgroup of women even more liberal.
So women have moved left, especially young women, and that coincides with the rise of wokeness as an ideology that dominates higher education.
But there's a counter-argument, which is that plenty of the things we identify with woke culture existed in places around the world long before women had moved left and long before women were dominating various parts of society. Here's David French making the counter-case. He starts by saying there are some significant areas where he agrees with Andrews' argument.
I also agree with Andrews that men and women are dispositionally different in the aggregate. By that, I mean that while any given woman can certainly be more stereotypically masculine (or any given man can be more stereotypically feminine), as a group men and women do tend to approach the world differently.
For example, a 2022 study of nearly 306,000 people in 57 countries found that women demonstrated more cognitive empathy than men in 36 countries, they were similar in 21 countries, and there was no country in which men registered higher cognitive empathy than women...
Empathy, demonstrated by a desire to prevent anyone's feelings from being hurt really could sum up a lot of woke culture. So French isn't dismissing this out of hand but he sees problems with the argument that stem from history.
...consider this remarkable assertion: “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” How can that claim survive even the most cursory historical analysis? Countless male-led revolutionary and radical movements have featured denunciations and purges, secret informants and struggle sessions.
It was not squadrons of women who guillotined dissenters during the French Revolution.
The French Revolution and also the Maoist revolution in China all happened before women were dominating much of anything. If that's so then it's difficult to pin wokeness merely on feminization. It's a point that at least has to be wrestled with.
Megan McArdle took a stab at looking at both sides of this in the Washington Post yesterday. She thinks the critics have a point, and yet the femininization argument is pretty convincing in some ways.
Andrews views all this rather apocalyptically, suggesting the feminine style threatens civilization itself because female modes of interaction, however excellent in their own way, “are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” She fears courts will abandon the rule of law in favor of nurturing everyone’s feelings, that journalism and academia will strive to conceal unpleasant truths and that business will lose its “swashbuckling spirit.”
This has, predictably, triggered pushback. David French took it on in the New York Times, and Cathy Young took it apart at the Bulwark. I agree with many of their criticisms, and yet I also have to admit that this hypothesis seems … not entirely wrong?
Cancel culture, for example, does feel like female-style aggression — one might even call it “toxic femininity.”...
The classic “Great Awokening” cancellations involved mobilizing a group against some target while fading into the background, sheltering behind anonymous complaints (remember the list of bad media men that circulated during the #MeToo movement?) or mass petitions. Even when cancellation artists sallied out on their own, they sought plausible deniability: surfacing some offense, “snitch-tagging” the target’s employer, then professing total astonishment at the predictable results.
These passive aggressive tactics aren’t the sole province of women, but they’re more common in groups of women than groups of men.
As is often the case, I don't think this is as simple as saying wokeness is one thing or wokeness is something else. Wokeness is complex and probably has many factors that played a role in its rise.
That said, I do think it's obvious that the kind of wokeness we're talking about mostly existed in academic hothouses twenty years ago and there's a reason why it has lumbered into the forefront of political culture over the past decade.
Wokeness has sometimes been described as the "woke mind virus" but in real life virus don't always infect (and effect) every group equally. COVID was especially deadly to the elderly and had relatively less impact on children. Similarly, wokeness may appeal more to women. So it's probably not a coincidence that the turn to the left by women and subsequent feminization of large parts of society has coincided with widespread wokeness. Put another way, wokeness would still exist if feminization wasn't happening, but it probably wouldn't be as omnipresent or as potent as it is.
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