Will "The Great Feminization" Displace the “old” Male-Dominated Model?

Journalist Helen Andrews gave a bracing talk at the National Conservatism conference in Washington this past September that is attracting huge international attention.

Entitled The Great Feminization, Andrews’ talk makes the claim that the changed behavior in recent years of major institutions and professions like universities, corporations and the law, and especially the rise of woke culture, can be attributed to one main factor. That factor is the increasing representation of women in their ranks. More women in these organizations and professions means, in Andrews’ view, more feminine patterns of behavior as values traditionally associated with women come to dominate.

While recognizing the changed behavior Andrews properly decries, I part company with her on the cause of that behavior. The issue is not “too many women”. That is just stereotyping and crude biological determinism. Women (and men for that matter) are only partly bearers of a set of attitudes and values innate to their sex that are universal, permanent, and immutable. They certainly start out life with certain emotional and intellectual predispositions. Some notable traits and dispositions are summarized in the table below.

Be that as it may, women, like all human beings, are, in the eyes of British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, “condemned to learn”. Life throws experiences at them, which they react to and draw lessons from. Earning our parents’ respect as children, birth order, being influenced by influential teachers, getting a first job, getting fired, developing close relationships with mentors and work colleagues, traveling, getting married, having a baby, buying a house, having to pay the bills, these are all everyday experiences that often transform our innate nature and instincts.

Because we learn and because what we learn changes our ideas and behavior, a more promising place to look for the rise of woke behavior in these vital institutions of society isn't “demographic feminization” (the increase in the proportion of women in institutions). Instead, the rise of “ideological feminization,” the dominance in the minds of the next generation of both women and men of an ideology rooted in values traditionally linked to women, offers a much more compelling explanation.

Getting the explanation right for institutional decline and corruption matters enormously. If the problem is too many women in universities and professions, then the solution is to hire more men, as Andrews recommends. But if the problem is a “mind virus” that has infected those of both sexes charged with the direction of our most vital institutions, then changing the proportions of men and women will leave that mind virus just as powerful and influential as it was before, and the behavior of our institutions unchanged.

What does this mind virus look like?

Without going too far into a comprehensive description of the values and ideas that inform this extreme ideology now controlling so many of our major institutions, let me list a few salient features to focus the discussion.

The central feature of this mind virus is the belief that all human relationships are essentially power relationships, meaning the world can be divided into those with power and those who are victims of those in power. Flowing from this is the moral conclusion that institutions ought to be seized by those who understand the oppressive and pervasive abuse of power and used by them to exalt the weak and cast down the mighty, in effect reversing those abusive power relationships. Gad Saad has called this suicidal empathy, and Eric Kaufman, humanitarian extremism.

Ironically, this ideology traces its modern origins back to nineteenth and twentieth century social movements dominated by men, such as the anti-slavery crusade, as well as Marxist-inspired social and political movements (e.g., political parties, some trade unions, and revolutionary movements and colonial liberation movements to mention just a few). 

From these critical, valuable roots, humanitarian extremism has evolved in surprising and disturbing directions. For example, since institutions can only reflect power relations, and since morality is (allegedly) only a smokescreen for power relations, any defense of traditional institutions on the ground that they embody moral principles (such as attempting to treat individuals according to uniform rules that respect their moral equality) is immediately dismissed as sharp practice.

Furthermore, this relentless focus on the supposed exploitation of the weak by the strong causes its advocates to argue that certain behaviors are linked to the “powerless.” Since the powerless are the people we are encouraged to uplift at the expense of the powerful, the behaviors associated with them also gain a revered status. Consider this as evidence that women (the largest group of the weak and exploited) often display leadership styles that are distinctly different from those of the powerful—namely, men. Society, having suffered from the favoritism of “male” leadership styles, must now compensate by promoting leadership styles and values traditionally associated with women.

Focusing on the values that should guide institutions and the “leadership styles” associated with men and women brings us back to Andrews’s central claim: we should understand the behavior of “woke”-dominated institutions as instances of allegedly female values and leadership styles displacing those of men. She goes further to argue that the solution to such institutional bad behavior is more men and fewer women in those institutions.

The first question to ask, then, is this: Is there a distinctive set of values and leadership styles that are specific to women as women and aretherefore determined by their sex?

The second question is whether women (and men, for that matter) learn from experience and can, therefore, adjust their values and leadership styles?

If the answer to the first question is no, then Andrews’s diagnosis of the woke disease afflicting our institutions is incorrect. And if the answer to the second question is yes, then Andrews’s prescription for fixing wokeness in the universities, in government, in the law, and elsewhere misses the mark.

Is there a distinctive set of values and leadership styles that are specific to women as women?

All this talk about distinctively “male” and “female” characteristics overlooks the fact that essentially all human characteristics exist in both sexes, though in varying proportions. Many psychological traits, for example, show an almost 80 percent overlap between men and women. However, there is a small number of traits on which they are demonstrably different on average, such as fear of violence, mechanical and spatial reasoning, interest in working with things as opposed to working with people, etc.. 

Note, I am not saying biology doesn’t matter, only that its importance is exaggerated. If we want to explain the different behaviors that predominate in each of the sexes, then what is the alternative explanation to biology?

What we consider "female behavior” is actually better understood not as the behavior of “women” as a biological sex, but as behavior we usually associate with subordinates in dominant/subordinate relationships. 

In other words, people who are traditionally excluded from the direct exercise of power develop certain consistent forms of behavior for dealing with those in authority and also for dealing with their peers (e.g. submissiveness, non-confrontationalism, fear of and aversion to violence, sacrificing other members of the group to get favors from the powerful, passive aggressiveness, passivity as a form of protest against abuse of power, a “be kind” ethos,  manipulativeness rather than direct pursuit of desired goals, etc., etc.). In other words, what is commonly viewed as “female” behavior is in fact this quite common subordinate behavior, behavior that has been inculcated in women over millennia as men have traditionally wielded power and women submitted to it.

If correct, then this idea implies that we have too often exaggerated how innate this behavior is to women as a sex. While there may well be biologically-determined predispositions in each sex to certain forms of behavior, it is also true that the sexes can and do learn from each other and from experience. It is not to deny differences between the sexes to recognize that the exercise of power will change women, then, precisely because the flip side of this basic proposition is also true, namely that the way men exercise power is not some awful male perversion but is in fact how people with power behave.

Powerful people do not behave this way because they are male, but because this is the most efficient way to wield power. It gets the job done; it worries more about outcomes than process. You don’t spend endless hours talking, making eye contact, and hugging but reaching no conclusion; you decide who is in charge, who then gathers the relevant facts, and then reaches a decision and hands out authority and tasks in consequence.

Thus, the criticism of women like Margaret Thatcher, that she “wasn’t really a woman” is not only condescendingly wrong. Margaret Thatcher shows us what a woman not a prisoner of millennia of socialization into submissive subordinate behavior does with power, which is to say that she acts like others who have successfully wielded power in pursuit of their aims. And the men around her, notoriously in her cabinet, quickly moved into the kind of subordinate behavior we commonly associate with women; a passive-aggressive, manipulative revolt from their ranks ultimately brought her down. Subordinate men canceled her. 

I hasten to add that I do not mean to imply that people in subordinate positions wield no power. They do. They wield it differently than people in dominant positions. The latter make decisions and implement them. Subordinates wield power by passive-aggression or influencing people in authority. The best illustration of this I ever heard was the outrage of an anti-suffragette woman in Edwardian Britain who sniffed that votes for women were unnecessary because any woman who could not get her husband to vote as she wished ought to be ashamed of herself.

Final observations on the “biology explains values” school

Those who ascribe to “women” the values of collaboration, empathy, exalting the weak, and so forth must be called upon to explain why it is that women were, until quite recently, more conservative than men on average. The ideological tilt of women to the left began with young, university-educated women in the 1980s and tends still to be concentrated among the university-educated.

Similarly, the defenders of the idea of innate and immutable sex-determined values and beliefs have to wrestle with the fact that women, again on average, tend to back what has been called the “prestige moral order”, whether it accords with our prejudices about “female values” or not. Thus, women handed out white feathers to non-combatant men in the Great War, and Russian women are nearly as bloodthirsty as Russian men with respect to the war in Ukraine. And now that wokeness is part of today’s prestige moral order, they favor that ideology disproportionately as well.

Do women learn from experience and, therefore, adjust their values and leadership styles?

Andrews focuses on how power is transformed within our institutions when they become majority-female. That is fine as far as it goes, and I agree with much of what she says. It is certainly undeniable that the rise of women in key institutions has changed the values and objectives those institutions pursue and, therefore, their behavior.

So women in power change institutions. What she is silent on, however, is how the exercise of power can and does change women.

If I am correct that women’s values and leadership styles are not solely determined by biology but are also shaped by a long history of being in socially subordinate positions, then as women move into positions of power in institutions, more of them will start to understand how power actually works and will change their attitudes and behaviors accordingly. They will start to understand when the rule of law is corrupted as Andrews demonstrates. They will also come to understand that authority , when exercised to privilege women as a sex, necessarily discriminates against men, including men that they care about, such as husbands and sons. The exercise of power will therefore have transformative effects on women.

Women will also come to see that the “subordinate model” of organization, which emphasizes discussion, consultation, convening, empathy, worrying more about participants‘ feelings than about actual results, is a poor model to follow if what you want to achieve is success in the real world. That poor track record is not because the male members of the patriarchy undermine their success, but because these behaviors don’t lead to success.

There is a reason, for example, why women-owned businesses tend to be small and enjoy limited growth, because the women who run them may well be prisoners of the subordinate pattern of behavior. It is women who break that mould who enjoy success in running large organizations. Think Judith McKenna, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Madeleine Albright, or Condoleezza Rice. 

Businesses run on what are traditionally thought of as “female values”, such as co-ops, worker-owned organizations, etc., succeed or grow particularly well beyond a small scale, and that is because they cannot successfully compete against companies run by people who actually wield power effectively, whether they be men or women.

There are other reasons to think that experience helps mould or soften biological dispositions in both sexes, making men and women more alike. So, for example, men and women are more alike in specific groups with shared experiences than they are with members of their own sex from different backgrounds.

Thus, to use a Canadian example, women in Alberta are more like men in Alberta in their political views than, say, they are like women in Quebec, and in the US, the same essentially holds for women in Texas compared to those in California. Something similar can be said about rural men and women versus city dwellers, married women versus singles. Stay-at-home mothers are markedly more conservative than career women – especially single or unmarried ones. Women with postgraduate degrees are, in many dimensions, more like men with similar education levels than working-class women. Shared experiences and face-to-face connections are the stuff of the bonds of sympathy that shape our lives more than biology. 

Now this “learning from experience” might take a longish time to bear fruit in how women wield power. In the context of Andrews’s alarm about the corruption of our institutions, that is worth worrying about. I feel confident, however, that we can accelerate the transformation, not by dividing society into irreconcilable male and female camps, but by focusing on how power is most effectively used, which is a judicious blend of male and female power-wielding traits. 

It is not that men cannot learn anything about wielding power from women. The former, for example, may err on the side of decisiveness rather than taking the time to master the facts and get their team on side, just as women may spend too much time obsessing about people’s feelings and ensuring that everyone feels consulted.

Biology vs Interests

What Andrews describes as the feminization of institutions (by which she means their numerical domination by women who, on average, display a certain set of predictable behaviors because of their sex) is more appropriately thought of as the ideological capture of these institutions by a contentious feminist ideology. The great attraction of that ideology has been to allow a newly emerging class of educated women to lay claim to a disproportionate number of jobs in those institutions by making it less and less ideologically defensible to hire anyone but women. This is therefore less about biology and more about interests.

I contend, for example, that working class women, not having been exposed to the feminist indoctrination of their university-educated sisters, are far less disposed to share the latter’s belief in the virtues of allegedly anti-patriarchal, female-friendly, collaborative, non-hierarchica,l and long-winded forms of organization. They are much more inclined to use what works than what is consistent with feminist ideology, and not to care overmuch about the sex of who is in charge.

These things matter. Feminist ideologues, knowing that their model of social organization won’t thrive in competition with meritocratic models, try and hive off ever greater shares of society into sectors that are shielded from competition, like government, health care, child care, education, etc. One of the great battles before us, therefore, is to subject these sectors and institutions to the bracing winds of real competition so that the false premises of the feminists’ argument (i.e., that women display a distinct and superior set of behaviors to men and therefore are entitled to rule) can be exposed for what they really are.

Moreover, if the pursuit of woke values is in fact due in part to it being fashionable to do so (the “prestige moral values”), as wokeism loses its shine, its value as a signal of being in tune with the times will decline, as is already happening in the private sector. Disney and Budweiser, for example, have both learned in the most painful way possible the truth of the aphorism “Go woke, go broke”. Taken together with US Supreme Court decisions that have dissolved the judicial imprimatur of race-based admissions criteria at universities and other manifestations of DEI, the self-interest of university-educated elites in showing themselves to be fashionably woke will recede. 

Conclusion 

Helen Andrews is undoubtedly on to something when she identifies the rise within our institutions of behaviors traditionally associated with women as a significant cause of the spread of what I have called here “subordinate” or “sub-dominant” thinking. This has undeniably damaging effects on those institutions. 

The correct solution, however, is not to use institutional means (reverse DEI) to promote men or to do as Andrews counsels and limit the number of women in important institutions. The better solution is the classically liberal approach. That approach includes:

One, a return to strict meritocracy, wherein we do not allow discrimination based on irrelevant personal characteristics (sex, age, race, etc.), but on demonstrated ability to do the task at hand;

Two, allowing markets to demonstrate public disapproval of many woke values and urging business leaders to accelerate the jettisoning of these values at the very least for practical commercial reasons;

Three, continuing the judicial assault on the hitherto unchallenged prestige moral order whose promotion has been understood as the sine qua non of a successful professional career for many in the universities, the professions, and the public sector.

Beyond all that, we must do what Andrews has singularly failed to do: challenge the idea that women possess some “alternative way of doing things” that is unique to them and must displace the “old” male-dominated model.

Such biologically determined values and behaviors likely exist, but they are neither the only nor the most important force shaping women’s behavior. Biological determinism is largely a distraction. Instead, we are faced with a destructive ideology embraced by both men and women in positions of authority within our most important institutions. By removing the woke jargon of fixing society through reclaiming long-devalued “women’s ways of doing things,” we can finally focus on the real task: evaluating the behaviors and values of all individuals — men and women — based on their moral and practical merits.

Brian Lee Crowley is the founder and Managing Director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (Ottawa) and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security (Washington DC).