Women’s professional rise is good, actually

Helen Andrews is spreading panic, not telling forbidden truths.

A wave of women entering professional life transformed workplaces, institutions, and the meaning of “office culture.” (Photo by Goodboy Picture Company)

When I was working on my “Neoliberalism and its enemies” series, I kept thinking about how bizarre the A.I. historians of the future will find that entire conversation.

Looking back on the United States (and the Western world more broadly) between 1970 and 2020, the big social change was not airline deregulation or the greater prominence of microeconomists in public policy debates — it was the massive influx of women into the workplace and the related opening of professional opportunities to them.

Neoliberalism and its enemies

A change this titanic in scale can’t help but have both positive and negative consequences.

To consider an obvious one, our entire public education system was structured around two assumptions. First, that moms would be available to care for children during the many days when schools are closed. Second, that women’s exclusion from most white-collar careers would give the education system access to the labor of the smartest and most motivated women at a discount salary.

Toppling those two pillars has made American education much less functional, a fact everyone knows and no one wants to acknowledge, largely because the old system was so manifestly unfair.

And men and women are different in both their personalities and their political views, so beyond mechanical impacts on the labor force, we’ve also seen changes in the norms and vibes of many institutions.

The movie “Spotlight,” set in 2001, includes a scene in which a frankly not-that-important disagreement between Mark Ruffalo and Michael Keaton devolves into screaming and door-slamming. “She Said,” set in 2017 and also based on a true story, features an all-woman investigative team, and even though people disagree, nobody screams.

This is true to my experience of a genuine shift in newsroom norms over the course of my career, where yelling in the office has gone from normalized to borderline unheard of. That’s not because all men yell and no women yell, but there is a palpable gender difference in inclination to transform disagreements into screaming matches. A reduction in office yelling is both a cause and consequence of more women in newsrooms.

Progressives were (and are) the driving force behind the feminist revolution, but for ideological reasons, they’re often reluctant to openly discuss sex differences. As a result, the social consequences of women transforming workplaces are discussed almost exclusively on the right.

Unfortunately, these discussions are typified by Helen Andrews’s recent “Great Feminization” screed, in which she claims that these workplace shifts not only feature some downsides, but pose “a potential threat to civilization.”

Like most conservative cultural commentary, it’s written in an aggressive, almost willfully anti-persuasive tone. The text seems designed to attract the attention of woke scolds, so that Andrews’s fellow conservatives can complain that the left is in denial about basic facts of human biology, leaving many of her key factual and normative claims underscrutinized.

But this is a serious topic that deserves better than sloppy partisan demagoguery.

A habit of wild overstatement

Andrews’s key argument denies the obvious reality that an extremely large share of occupational feminization consists of women displacing less-qualified men from roles women would have previously been excluded from.

She considers this possibility but breezily dismisses it with the palpably untrue claim that civil-rights law makes it literally illegal to underrepresent women, especially in top management:

The most obvious thumb on the scale is anti-discrimination law. It is illegal to employ too few women at your company. If women are underrepresented, especially in your higher management, that is a lawsuit waiting to happen. As a result, employers give women jobs and promotions they would not otherwise have gotten simply in order to keep their numbers up.

I am sure that someone on the right could write an intelligent critique of statutory employment-discrimination law and its interpretation by American courts.

But the actual thing that Andrews has written here is clearly not true.

Tons of companies underrepresent women in their workforces, and also tons of companies underrepresent women in top management. There are no doubt women out there somewhere who received promotions they didn’t really deserve in service of some diversity goal. But in addition to wildly overstating the scale of this effect, Andrews just completely brushes aside the equally obvious existence of actual sexism and misogyny.

Whatever you think of some of the excesses of the #MeToo era, Harvey Weinstein’s crimes were real — and he was an extremely influential man in Hollywood! Do you think his presence, and that of the men who looked the other way, has zero implications for how many women got a shot at directing ambitious projects or at moving up the ladder in production roles?

There are also plenty of sub-criminal dynamics in the workplace that are nevertheless harmful. My sister-in-law was an electrician for a while, but she ended up leaving the field, in part thanks to misogynistic vibes on construction worksites. She didn’t leave in a blaze of litigation; it was just unpleasant, so she quit.

And let’s examine a case in which we have a pretty rigorous estimate of who is qualified — training of medical doctors.

In 2023-24, women accounted for 54.6 percent of medical students. Is that a thumb on the scale in their favor? Well, not really — they were 57 percent of applicants. Is the lower admissions rate for women a sign of discrimination against women applicants? Again, I don’t think so — female applicants have slightly lower MCAT scores on average, which is partially offset by slightly higher G.P.A.s. One could quibble around the margin in either direction, but I think it’s clear that the aggregate impact of the rise of the female medical student over the past 50 years has been to improve the available human capital.

Andrews opens her tale of woe by recounting the story of Larry Summers’s defenestration as president of Harvard University for speculating that gender parity in hard sciences would never be achieved due to sex differences in interests and capabilities.

I think she is correct to say that Summers was treated shabbily in that case.

However, she herself is completely blind to the implication that women have come to dominate in certain other fields via the exact same mechanism.

Women have higher verbal ability (on average) and are more interested (on average) in work that involves a lot of interpersonal interaction. The fields that have become significantly “feminized” are the ones that play into those strengths. No overweening civil-rights law has caused a massive influx of women into computer programming or driving trucks (notably this is true even though women are safer drivers on average). It’s true that in the recent past someone like James Damore might get fired for being too blunt and rude about this. But even at Peak Woke, no major tech companies were fielding 50-percent-female engineering teams. Some fields have stayed very male and other fields are becoming predominantly female, and in both directions one of the main causes is that men and women are in fact different and this matters for matching, comparative advantage, compensating differentials, and other aspects of the labor market.

What we know about sex differences

As far as I can tell, the basic findings from the 2011 article “Gender Differences in Personality Across the 10 Aspects of the Big Five” continue to hold up.

At a high level, women are more agreeable than men. The evidence is mixed on conscientiousness, and women generally experience more negative emotional responses (this is called “neuroticism” in the literature, but I don’t love that term) especially anxiety and depression. Men and women come out about the same on openness to experience and extraversion.

If you look in more detail, one exception to the negative emotions rule is that men are often found to be higher in anger or angry hostility (hence screaming in the newsroom).

On openness to experience, it averages out overall, but women express more openness to novel aesthetics and men more openness to novel abstract ideas. On extraversion, similarly, women score higher on measures related to warmth and gregariousness, and men are higher on measures related to self-assertion and seeking excitement.

The gender gaps in specific facets of personality are not really all that large, but the gender gaps in aggregate personality are pretty big.

This is sort of like what happens with faces. Even without evidence from hair and makeup, people can pretty reliably identify male versus female faces. But if you zoom in on just a nose or just eyes or just a chin, it’s much harder to tell.

Gender dimorphism in facial attributes is real, but it’s fairly subtle, and there’s plenty of room for overlap on individual features. But there isn’t a lot of overlap in the overall gestalt. By the same token, plenty of men are warmer than the average woman and plenty of men are more anxious than the average woman and plenty of men are less angry than the average woman. But it’s a lot rarer for an individual man to overlap with the average woman on all personality attributes simultaneously.

The main thing that Andrews and other critics of feminization are pointing to is that institutions with more women in them manifest more agreeableness:

Female group dynamics favor 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 ostracize their enemies.

She then essentially characterizes all of “woke” politics as agreeableness run amok — “everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” She is concerned that a woman-dominated academia will be “oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.”

So in the pursuit of open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth, I think it’s important to once again point out the wildly overstated nature of these claims.

Her bit about women being incapable of giving orders or delivering blunt criticism meets the “true enough for a stand-up comedy routine” standard, but it’s not literally true, any more than men are unable to console a sad person or deliver a kind compliment.

There are real differences in dispositions, and it can be funny to caricature them in pop culture, but it’s also important to say things that are true — especially if you’re claiming that the future of civilization is at stake. Andrews leaps readily from overstated-but-fact-based assertions about personality differences to a wildly unfounded assertion that female judges are incapable of applying the rule of law. If you want to read an actual literature review about gender and judicial rulings, I would recommend this from Allison Harris and Maya Sen, which finds (more or less) that the differences are dominated by ideology and partisanship.

In other words, most of the women on the bench are appointed by Democrats, so they issue more left-wing rulings than men, on average. Of course, if you’re a right-wing partisan you could say that left-wing judicial rulings are per se lawless, so female judges (who are more left-wing) are thus bad. But I would really urge people to apply some critical thinking to this kind of assessment. The Warren- and Burger-era Supreme Court rulings that conservatives hate were handed down by an all-male SCOTUS, and the most “go rogue” left-wing judge of all-time was William Douglas. Amy Coney Barrett judges like a conservative Republican because that’s what she is.

Being normal about change

The strongest point that Andrews makes in her whole piece is that free speech is an important value, especially in institutions like journalism and academia, and that women are less supportive of free speech than men. This is a longstanding gap visible in multiple General Social Survey questions and other sources of information, and I think it’s genuinely unfortunate that women feel that way. On the other hand, it’s good that women care more about animal suffering and about helping poor people. On balance, I would say women’s opinions about political issues are better than men’s, but it is true that this is not the case on free speech.

At the same time, the manly men of the Trump administration are leading an unprecedented effort to use state power to suppress free speech, with tactics ranging from abuse of merger discretion to trying to push Jimmy Kimmel off the air to selective speech-based deportations and beyond. I’m not sure I’d say that this team’s bizarre war on Tylenol (or Trump’s insistence that he won the 2020 election) reflects the values of rationality and truth-seeking.

Andrews is right that men and women have different personalities, group dynamics, and values and that this means women’s professional empowerment has consequences beyond the mere fact of equality.

But she shows no real interest in exploring these consequences in a serious way or actually evaluating the merits. I personally find the rise of more agreeable office culture to be a little annoying in some respects, but I’m glad about the decline of in-office screaming.

Beyond the basic analytic unseriousness, though, Andrews’s argument lacks the courage of her convictions.

She tells us that the existence of female professors, journalists, lawyers, and judges is an existential threat to civilization, then claims she has no desire to take any opportunities away from anyone — she just wants to curb the bad employment-discrimination policies that she says give women an unfair leg up.

But there’s just no reason to believe women’s prominence in these roles has anything to do with H.R. or Title VII litigation. Love or hate Sonia Sotomayor or Barrett, they got to the Supreme Court the same way every justice has — a blend of political and jurisprudential considerations weighed by a broadly sympathetic president. The heft of Andrews’s piece comes from the prospect of widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying.