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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

Some excerpts:

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.

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.

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 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 tug 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.

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.

And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?

I found the whole essay quite interesting and also somewhat obvious in that 'oh I should've realized this and put it together before' sense. I read somewhere else on twitter that you could track the origins of civil rights/student activism to women gaining full entry to universities in America, as opposed to just chaperoned/'no picnicking out together' kind of limited access. Deans and admin no longer felt they could punish and control like when it was a male environment, plus young men behave very differently when there are sexually available women around. So there's also a potential element of weakened suppression due to fear of female tears and young men simping for women, along with the long-term demographic change element.

Though I suspect it may be more multi-factorial than that, with the youth bulge and a gradual weakening of the old order. A man had to make the decision to let women into universities after all.

I also find Helen Andrews refreshing in that she's not stuck in the 'look at me I'm a woman who's prepared to be anti-feminist, I'm looking for applause and clicks' mould, she makes the reasons behind her article quite clear:

Because, after all, I am not just a woman. I am also someone with a lot of disagreeable opinions, who will find it hard to flourish if society becomes more conflict-averse and consensus-driven. I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world. I am—we all are—dependent on institutions like the legal system, scientific research, and democratic politics that support the American way of life, and we will all suffer if they cease to perform the tasks they were designed to do.

Another idea that occurred to me is that the committee that drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR's wife. The UN Declaration of Human Rights was instrumental in establishing what we now understand as progressivism. That piece of international law, (really the origin of 'international law' as we understand it today, beyond just the customary law of embassies) directly led to the Refugee Convention of 1951 that has proven quite troublesome for Europe's migrant crisis, it introduced the principle of non-refoulement. It also inspired the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965):

Each State Party undertakes to encourage, where appropriate, integrationist multiracial organizations and movements and other means of eliminating barriers between races

Shall declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, incitement to racial discrimination

Sounds pretty woke! Note that states don't necessarily follow through on international law or sign up with it fully in the first place: Israel, America, Russia and so on routinely ignore these kinds of bodies in the foreign policy sphere. The Conventions and Committees are feminine in a certain sense in that they can be ignored without fear of violence, unlike an army of men. Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

To some extent international law could be considered an early feminized field, or perhaps it was born female. Are there any other feminized fields we can easily think of? Therapists, HR and school teachers come to mind, though that seems more recent.

This entire argument was stated back in 1964 by an eminent professor:

HIGGINS What in all of heaven could've prompted her to go,
After such a triumph as the ball?
What could've depressed her;
What could've possessed her?
I cannot understand the wretch at all.

Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!
There heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags!
They're nothing but exasperating, irritating,
vacillating, calculating, agitating,
Maddening and infuriating hags!
[To Pickering] Pickering, why can't a woman be more like a man?

PICKERING
Hmm?

HIGGINS
Yes... Why can't a woman be more like a man? Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historic'ly fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can't a woman be like that?
Why does ev'ryone do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do ev'rything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up- well, like their father instead?
Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please;
Whenever you are with them, you're always at ease.
Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?

PICKERING
Of course not!

HIGGINS
Would you be livid if I had a drink or two?

PICKERING
Nonsense.

HIGGINS
Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?

PICKERING
Never.

HIGGINS
Well, why can't a woman be like you?
One man in a million may shout a bit.
Now and then there's one with slight defects;
One, perhaps, whose truthfulness you doubt a bit.
But by and large we are a marvelous sex!
Why can't a woman take after like a man?
Cause men are so friendly, good natured and kind.
A better companion you never will find.
If I were hours late for dinner, would you bellow?

PICKERING
Of course not!

HIGGINS
If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?

PICKERING
Nonsense.

HIGGINS
Would you complain if I took out another fellow?

PICKERING
Never.

HIGGINS
Well, why can't a woman be like us?

[To Mrs. Pearce]
Mrs. Pearce, you're a woman...
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so decent, such regular chaps.
Ready to help you through any mishaps.
Ready to buck you up whenever you are glum.
Why can't a woman be a chum?
Why is thinking something women never do?
Why is logic never even tried?
Straight'ning up their hair is all they ever do.
Why don't they straighten up the mess that's inside?
Why can't a woman behave like a man?
If I was a woman who'd been to a ball,
Been hailed as a princess by one and by all;
Would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing?
And carry on as if my home were in a tree?
Would I run off and never tell me where I'm going?
Why can't a woman be like me?

I find it somewhat interesting that the male objections to Helen Andrews' thesis are something like 'hmm, what about China and Japan, does it hold there?' and the female objections seem more like 'Helen Andrews should STFU and be a secretary, how dare she be a journalist if she's not going to advocate for women' or 'if men are so great how come they are so violent and abuse alcohol so much?' or 'here's a long and open-to-interpretation section of a play'.

It's not that "she should be a secretary if she's not going to advocate for women", it's that this is where her argument breaks down (hopefully, she expands on it elsewhere in a more detailed and considered way). If we want to go back to the days of the masculine office, we go back to the days of "women are secretaries and men are bosses". She's sawing off the branch she is sitting on, without seeming to realise it.

As I have been trying to point out, if her argument is that "society is too feminised, the professions are too feminised", then the natural outcome of that is that, as a woman in the professions, she is part of the problem. Just by being a female presence in a male space, she contributes as part of the mass of women taking over. So she must, by the logic of her own argument, step back and step down if she is serious about solving the problem. Otherwise, it's as pointless as land acknowledgements: "yeah we took your stuff, no we're not giving it back". Yeah, women took over the male domains, no we're not leaving.

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.

It is rational for them to do this, because the consequences for failing to do so can be dire. Texaco, Goldman Sachs, Novartis, and Coca-Cola are among the companies that have paid nine-figure settlements in response to lawsuits alleging bias against women in hiring and promotions. No manager wants to be the person who cost his company $200 million in a gender discrimination lawsuit.

Anti-discrimination law requires that every workplace be feminized. A landmark case in 1991 found that pinup posters on the walls of a shipyard constituted a hostile environment for women, and that principle has grown to encompass many forms of masculine conduct. Dozens of Silicon Valley companies have been hit with lawsuits alleging “frat boy culture” or “toxic bro culture,” and a law firm specializing in these suits brags of settlements ranging from $450,000 to $8 million.

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. Naturally employers err on the side of making the office softer. So if women are thriving more in the modern workplace, is that really because they are outcompeting men? Or is it because the rules have been changed to favor them?

A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50–50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.

That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?

And then:

As a woman myself, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to pursue a career in writing and editing. Thankfully, I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power. I think people will be surprised to discover how much of our current feminization is attributable to institutional changes like the advent of HR, which were brought about by legal changes and which legal changes can reverse.

Yeah, but once again, what's fair rules? Unwind all anti-discrimination law? Okay, now can Helen be fired for getting pregnant? And everyone is tut-tutting at me for asking "how many women is too many?" but unless we set some sort of baseline, all too soon it becomes "any women is too many" in a particular profession or field.

I don't think a woman should be hired just because she's a woman, anymore than someone who's a minority or BIPOC or other DEI. But Helen wants meritocracy, and we got here because meritocracy didn't work - the old school tie was stronger than that. "Susan is better qualified than Jim, but Jim went to my university".

Helen wants "not so many women, but I don't get touched, because I am the Magical Woman who is male-brained and won't disrupt the masculine office culture nor soften society with my emotional, feelings-based, style of running things".

Why should I, or any male hiring manager, take it on trust that Helen is that Magical Woman? On the contrary, I get her CV in with the job application, see her name is "Helen Andrews", and toss it aside because "it's legal to have a masculine office culture again, and so I only hire men".

I'd rather have seen a section from Aristophanes' Assemblywomen if we were doing this.

I think this article is directionally correct in some areas but falls to shady and just so thinking in others. The most easy barometer is to check if women in the workplace have this same effect in other cultures and they largely don't if you look at nonwestern developed societies these issues at a personal level are much much less. We don't have unhinged Japanese HR ladies lecturing Japanese salarymen on diversity or the evils of Japaneseness. Or take an example I'm more familiar with China. China has literal political commissars in it's major companies and yet these are a lot less interested in your personal opinions than the DEI offices in the West.

but we don't even need to go that far just take a look at your local Sbarro(or equivalent shitty chain job) My guess would be most of us have worked in a job like this but if you haven't these kind of workplace tensions are almost entirely absent. The personalities you work with and your manager matter far more than whether the Sbarro you work for is majority male of female. A white collar office has a vein of respectability and a political regime that prevents any sort of equilibrium. The HRification of corporate jobs allows a certain type of female toxicity to thrive and I think the line that's most pertinent is the line that a woman has a recourse if her boss runs her workplace like a frat house but a man doesn't if his boss runs it like a kindergarten, however, I don't think this is a natural quality of women entering the workplace. She's entirely right that this is the product of the civil rights act and the HRification of society and I don't think you need much more.

Some of the other conclusions seem a bit less supported for example the supposition that women will ruin law. Anglo/Western forms of law are a delicate thing and extreme outliers in society and we don't see other types of law having these kind of protections. Most law at most times and places essentially all in highly patriarchal societies bears a lot more resemblance to title IX, then to the, Right of Englishmen we enjoy. A lot of the dismantling of traditions and rights is a function of progressivism which yes has more women believers but is not an essential category of womeness. How many Japanese women are arguing to import millions of refugees or release violent offenders? We've created a system of commissars to enforce, White Middle Class progressivism, and give spoils to POC you don't need to anything so drastic as ban women from the workplace you just need to dismantle the system and let offices function like your neighborhood Sbarro.

I think looking outside the West is a good way to approach this. Clearly it is not simply a case that women in the workplace = the end of objectivity but there does seem to be something of an interaction between a high female percentage in a field, WEIRDness and identity politics that leads to the negative outcomes the author talks about.

I think it has a lot to do with context. China and Japan are just significantly different places with different histories and social issues express themselves differently there. Social science doesn't need to encompass the whole world. WEIRD is weird from the perspective of Japan and vis versa. On the one hand, fewer women in high office than in the West. On the other hand, less sexual violence, husbands are supposed to give their wife their wages and receive back an allowance. So is it a feminist country or a patriarchal country? Neither really, the concepts we've built up are based in a context and expectations that aren't there.

Furthermore, Helen is not even saying to ban women from the workplace so much as 'have fair tests for admittance.'

On the other hand, less sexual violence

I think it's just endemic and underreported. I've heard that cops here will often blow off accusations of assault or violence unless it's truly egregious. He's your boyfriend/husband, right? Are you sure you weren't just having a lovers quarrel? He could get in a lot of trouble if you insist on reporting this, you know. What were you doing out this late, anyway? Were you drinking? A young woman your age shouldn't be doing that sort of thing. Etc etc. Which is not to say that they don't have a point, but I think there may be more sexual violence that you see in the news or in official stats.

Wouldn't we be able to tell if it was endemic though? We could estimate maybe via observing the spread of STDs in the country, or murders (hard to hide the disappearance of a dead wife or rape/murder victim), observe the behaviour of Japanese travellers overseas or just check vibes.

There may indeed be more sexual violence than is reported but it's probably still much lower than in the West, where there are also reporting problems (a big cover-up of grooming gangs in the UK for instance). If we do away with official data and go off vibes, pretty sure Japan still comes out ahead.

I think there is definitely less murder and violent assault, it is indeed hard to hide a missing wife or girlfriend.

But unlike many other countries, perverts generally seem to avoid tourists. Western women are stereotyped as being more assertive, and they're generally just physically larger and less demure than Japanese women. And from what I can tell and what I've been told, Japanese men just aren't that attracted to non-Japanese women. There seems to be an assumption that Japanese women are the most feminine, womanly women out there, and that anything else is a downgrade. And there's also the faint but pervasive sentiment permeating every layer and aspect of Japanese life that anything Japanese is "good" and "normal" while anything foreign, while perhaps interesting, is nonetheless alien and inferior (c.f. the stereotypical 20th century Englishman's "proper tea," "proper fish and chips," "foreign parts," etc).

On the other hand, very much like other countries, I've heard that a lot of the sexual assaults happen to lower-class women -- unsupervised teenage daughters of single working moms, young women very drunk or passed out in a nightlife district, and of course, young girls in crowded trains (although this seems to be decreasing). It seems like there is quite a lot of this, and tourists rarely experience it.

As a lawyer, I think the law point is where she might be closest. I think the academy in law has already fully seen this effect. There is no longer excellence qua excellence in most of the "elite" institutions. Box checking and credentialism have replaced any idea of seeking peak performance. Tests have been de-emphasized to support this, and where they exist they are no longer brutal and grueling, but are much more likely to be easy to finish on time, and mostly just repetition of well worn talking points that can easily be spoonfed to students in a powerpoint or class-provided outline.

Putting women in law and medicine is also dumb for another reason, which is that you force the most intelligent women to have a lower TFR than they otherwise might have. And you force them into a dysgenic and unhealthy motherhood environment, because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

Also, it seems to me that women just don’t think up interesting ideas at the same rate men do. As someone who ravenuously pursues interesting ideas and thoughts (as I imagine many themotte users do as well), about 99% of interesting ideas I read are produced by men. And if you look at the places where interesting ideas proliferate without the allure of a secondary reward (social attention), it’s overwhelmingly men, like on the anonymous humanities or political board of 4chan (which like it or not has had an enormous influence on today’s online culture). And the games which focus on creative problem solving, strategy or Minecraft style games, are overwhelmingly male, whereas the cosmetic and nurturing games are overwhelmingly female. This tells us something because what people do in their leisure is what they like to do without the watchful eye of society. So, women can do systems-oriented creative problem solving, but will they if they don’t have a structure involving secondary rewards of cogent social reinforcement (degrees and peer competition), by which they can feel superior to their pretty peers? I’m going to say usually not, most just don’t do that, but that’s an issue if we want people who intrinsically love problem-solving in every kind of role like that — such people require less mentoring, less extrinsic reward infrastructure, might come up with a novel insight out of the blue, etc

My parents are gynecologists, and I don't think I've suffered in the least from having my mom be a working doctor.

I believe that it is nigh universal for female doctors to work fewer hours/in less hectic specialties than their male peers, on average. That is not necessarily a bad thing, the concerns @Throwaway05 raises below have far more to do with the AMA limiting medical seats and residencies than it has to do with a universal requirement for all doctors to be Type A workaholics. Yes, if there is a severe paucity of doctors, you want doctors who work longer and harder. Yet the option to have more doctors who don't work brutal hours exists.

because stress before and during pregnancy increases the risk of all sorts of impairments in children, and a stressful occupation prevents the kind of loving mother-child bond that is essential during the first three years of life. Your milk will be filled with stress hormones, and your mood will be too stressed for your child to feel safe in the world, and your child will forever have a slightly autistic unease because they did not sustain sufficient skin contact to modulate oxytocin, like the wire monkeys. We have screwed up an entire generation of intelligent adolescents this way, though the effects are almost impossible to study (who is willing to do this to a twin?). And I think a lot of modern ills (overuse of smart phones, parasocial relationships, etc) are consequences of an impoverished bond to the mother during early life.

These specific claims are dubious to say the least. The amount of maternal cortisol in breast milk is tiny, and the effects on nursing infants negligible. I think there is a rather significant difference, both quantitative and qualitative, between a "wire mother" and a mother who works full-time.

AMA limiting medical seats and residencies than it has to do

Sir!

I expect better from you, that's not how it works at all. ;_;

What have my rants been for!

Hmm? Doesn't the AMA limiting seats lead to increased wages for physicians plus a relative lack of doctors everywhere, which makes it easier for them to only work in preferred locations (cities)?

I'm not sure which rant in question says otherwise!

This is a meme passed around by anti-doctor idiots.

The government funds a good chunk to most of the residency spots, this number has been flat mostly due to US government dysfunction. Hospitals and States are welcome to fund their own spots and in recent years have increasingly done so (with mixed results since one of the biggest funders is a shitty for-profit health system).

Every year there are tons of unmatched residency spots (almost always in less desirable specialties). Places would rather not be fully matched than pull from the candidacy base.

When it comes to Medical Schools, the number of them has increased wildly in recent years. This has been questionably helpful because most of the new ones are bad and residencies won't take bad applicants, they'd rather try and SOAP or try again next year.

Additionally, because of the salaries the U.S. never has to deal with an applicant shortage - most of the world's best students will try and match here, even if the U.S. schools don't have enough graduates they don't need to worry (again they just won't take them because reasons).

Lastly it seems reasonable to assume that the AMA has some questionable lobbying on this subject in the past, I don't know about this for sure though - what I do know is that most of their lobbying has been spent on social causes and expansion of mid-level practice rights in the last few decades and they have rock bottom support from U.S. physicians at present. They are not an influential lobby either, which is why our salaries have been going down also for decades.

Thank you for taking the time to explain! I'll commit this to memory, whatever is left in it that's not receptor binding variances.

I will say that the shortage in specific competitive subspecialties is a little more complicated - I can't say for sure that they are lobbying to reduce training volumes but it wouldn't be a stupid thing for them to do. That said for many things (especially surgery) getting requisite case volumes and educational quality is an important complicating factor, especially in the era of robotic surgery.

Most of the "shortage" is inadequate primary volume, but primary care doesn't actually pay that much and people want to be in big cities so it is an allocation and funding problem.

But since "pay the doctors more" is an unacceptable response...it doesn't go anywhere.

If you'd like to learn more about the noodly bits of the American system their is a YouTuber Sheriff of Sodium who does long form videos analyzing these things.

Hmm.. I appreciate the context, but it seems somewhat orthogonal to the concerns I'd raised earlier. It is nigh universal (across professions to boot) for doctors to want to live in urban environments as opposed to some sleepy Appalachian town. You can increase the number of rural doctors by either increasing salaries (as you've mentioned as untenable) or by having so many doctors that market forces... force some of them to go to less desirable locales.

Now, I'm not advocating for the latter, I would like to live in a proper city myself. But I think it's obvious that that approach works.

More comments

Female doctors are by and large hiring nannies to give their children the stay at home mom experience, just with someone other than mom. Not daycare. These are, after all, high income women- they buy the cadillac plan for childcare, not the base model. There will functionally always be more teenagers on a gap year than there are high income mothers of young children, this equation is unlikely to change.

A much bigger and more immediate objection to the high female percentage in medicine- it isn't going to be, and probably shouldn't be, 0%, because like gynecologists- is that a limited number of doctors are produced per year and women doctors on average retire early and work fewer hours before then.

Yes female doctors hire nannies, and they are more likely to drop out of residency, have shorter careers, take more vacation, work less hours, and take on more administrative roles.

The absolutely huge gender disparity in medicine is a complete disaster because you need psycho hard working men for the whole thing to work.

God I wish I could get people IRL to think about this at all.

The absolutely huge gender disparity in medicine is a complete disaster because you need psycho hard working men for the whole thing to work.

And those men are either increasingly choosing to not work in medicine or have a different view on work life balance from their predecessors.

From what I've gathered from my doctor friends this issue is magnified in rural areas. Doctors choose to work there have a ton of leverage and their salaries are completely out of step with the local cost of living so just working part time still puts them in the local upper middle class, which many now choose to do. The local government can do nothing because most doctors want to work and live in the larger cities and they currently have no way of forcing doctors to work there beyond residency.

The exception to this is are smaller population centers that are effectively pseudo resort towns, like Östersund and Åre.

Night time shifts are another matter and don't seem like a problem for now, as apparently some people kind of enjoy them and the benefits they bring.

The local government can do nothing because most doctors want to work and live in the larger cities and they currently have no way of forcing doctors to work there beyond residency.

Cries in British physician

Isn't working in a rural hospital approximately 7 zillion times more chill?

SMH already answered but at a busy city health system you have a level 1 trauma center, inpatient consults, outpatient clinics for everything, internal medicine teams with appropriate specialties etc etc.

At a rural hospital all of those things are Phil, the local family medicine doctor.

Obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration but true rural medicine involves the ability to do anything which is both empowering and terrifying.

Also you are always on call - the city hospital has a dedicated nocturnist and moonlighters for holidays.

Uh.. Depends? The workload can vary, and you're often under a lot of stress because dedicated specialists are far away.

My contention is that the British government has, in fact, figured out the means to trap doctors in undesirable localities, including past residency in many cases. Of course, our residencies are almost twice as long as the global average, so we're effectively indentured for that duration.

Sounds like you are talking about outside the US - the US is usually different in medicine when it comes to a bunch of stuff. However it seems pretty similar on this issue. Yes male doctors are more "normal" now but you are still significantly more likely to find the population we want in men over women.

Doctors in the US also avoid rural areas but its a bit thornier because the US has a ton of them, the salaries involved can be eye popping in some places (like Alaska) and because a good chunk of the problem is downstream of politics. Since the student population is overwhelmingly leftist and feel like they are giving up good leftist opportunities by learning in Iowa City or Scranton, once given freedom they centralize on big blue cities much harder (especially since many are non-white and have racism fears in white places).

At this point we've spent decades farming poor and rich minorities and made no effort at all to grab people who are likely to return to Iowa after graduation. It's a problem.

Also it seems like night shifts in the U.S are increasingly done as part of part time money farming, poor resident staffing, and shit mid levels.

My sister in law is a nurse, not a doctor, but she has a lot of experience in surgery and trauma lvl 1/ER stuff. She's worked mostly in rural/super-rural/underserved areas for many years now, taking generally 6 month contracts all over the US. Wherever is paying the most she generally takes, with 2-3 months off in between, sometimes longer. Her kids are grown and she's single, no pets; we watch her place for her while she's out. Apparently there are some gov't programs that help fund this, I don't know all the details. She says she makes 4x-6x more doing this than if she just took a ER nurse job at the local hospital, and if they don't have surgeries or ER cases she spends a lot of the time not doing much work at all.

Yeah all kinds of arrangements do exist, I'll note specifically that nurses tend to wear a much more limited number of hats and have less burden associated with "being on call" and if no patient is in the ED no work for the nurse. The PCP may be seeing clinic patients in between ED patients.

The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years, or providing the skin contact and natural maternal affection that leads to healthy offspring. And because women are averse to pairing with men below their income unless the men compensate with unusual attractiveness, they have a lower rate of marriage than they would otherwise have. And because the school years are intense, they are delaying marriage. This dysgenic effect is more serious than the economic inefficiency effect, because you can’t easily produce more high iq citizens. In a pronatal culture, high iq women have more children than average, learning the skills of husband-acquiring and homemaking at an earlier age.

Besides AWFLs being perhaps the most likely demographic to breastfeed, there's no convincing evidence for benefits of breastfeeding outside of a slight reduction in minor rashes or gastrointestinal upset in babies. Nobody has demonstrated long-run benefits for the child of any kind.

This... doesn't pass the sniff test. Formula almost certainly isn't quite as good as breastmilk and we know early childhood nutrition is very important.

There's a wealth of literature on this. A Belarusian RCT is perhaps the most rigorous. It found reductions in skin and digestive conditions, but these conditions were rare even in the formula group, and it found no effect on respiratory conditions.

They followed up with the kids at age 6.5 (Kramer 2010) and found no evidence of health benefits.

It's a subject ripe for a more classic 'political correctness' to overtake it since there are mothers out there who can not breastfeed and the notion that these loving parents are depriving their children of optimal nutrition and upbringing is charged to say the least.

If you've ever been in a maternity ward it's difficult to convey how hard the staff pushes for breastfeeding. In my deep blue area mothers who just had a C section and have a baby in the NICU are constantly pressured to breastfeed (despite the pain from the surgery site while holding the baby) and pump to provide milk to the baby. All the usual progressive suspects (WHO, APA) are pro-breastfeeding. We are very much in the "breast is best" era.

That has not been my experience with my 3 kids. My impression is that there has been significant pushback against the push for breastfeeding so now the nurses and doctors are so careful not to push for breastfeeding that it feels like they are marketing formula.

I've talked with similarly aged parents (35-45) in other countries, including the US, and they shared similar experiences.

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And having been around a person who could not breastfeed, the only reassurance that can possibly be offered is 'it doesn't really matter' and 'babies that are breastfed also get 'gastrointestinal upset' all the time, it's not your fault'.

I don't disagree that we are in the "breast is best" era, but the subject is nevertheless ripe for political correctness to overtake it.

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And so we're back around to the subject of the OP.

Given the social class correlates of breastfeeding, female doctors almost certainly pump so the nanny has breastmilk on hand, and being literal doctors they have access to medical interventions to enable later childbearing- I'd be surprised if female doctors had fewer kids than female accountants, lawyers, etc. Upper class modern women have a low TFR because they choose to do this, not because they start having kids in their thirties(it's totally possible to have 3+ kids starting after thirty- I know a lot of people who've done it- and once more doctors have, by virtue of their incomes and training, access to much better medical interventions for enabling such things than the general public). Female doctors simply don't want to have more than two and so they don't. Yes yes cultural values. But 'women can go to medschool' is a minor part compared to the barrage of antinatalist propaganda shoved down their throats.

Given how good formula is, the chances that pumped, refrigerated, then reheated, breastmilk is providing whatever marginal benefits from-the-source breastmilk does is probably dubious at best. I mean, the formula powder is made to be mixed, heated, etc. Breast milk is made to be drank from the breast. Anything else and its probably rapidly degrading, particularly if you are returning it to body temp for serving.

Not that I dont applaud the effort of pumping. At the very least its converting your excess fat into something useful. It might even provide a 0.1% advantage for you (any greater seems dubious with the stats now, plus my own experiences).

It is significantly less pleasant being the parent of a young child in your late 30s compared to your late 20s

I saw someone remark 'You're able to pull all-nighters in college because that's when you should be having children' and that line as stuck in me like a thorn.

I'll second this. I know, I know, starting later means you've had more time to improve your economic situation, but I just don't see that as worth the downsides, as far as my own life and those others I observe IRL go.

Having experienced the latter and currently experiencing the former, I wish I could have started in my early 20s.

Yep. My wife and I had our final kid mid 30s. The first few months hit harder compared to our first in late 20s despite having a lot more experience re mid 30s

I 100% believe this but there's like 10,000 things that push upper middle class women to have kids in their thirties instead of their twenties, it isn't a 'education takes too long' problem even if that's part of the problem. If we're going to worry about that maybe worry about how long courtship takes nowadays first.

The nannies are not breastfeeding in crucial early life years

A brief search suggests wet nursing still exists as a practice in the US, but isn't terribly common. Maybe that'd see a resurgence, but honestly formula babies seen to turn out mostly okay too.

This is some JB-style made-up evpsych, along with JB-style "I am a very manly and interesting thinker." Come on, if you are going to argue something as dubious as "Women shouldn't be in stressful intellectual fields because they're dull and it also turns their kids autistic," you need to point at something more rigorous than monkey studies and oxytocin.

The bailey of your argument is far too narrow to support that motte.

What is JB?

He was a manifestard regular on here who's been permabanned for poor engagement in his repetitive one note posting about lowering the age of consent.

Oh, was that Julius Branson of Powerology fame? I didn't associate age of consent stuff with him but then I didn't read most of what he wrote. He did show up on a mutual discord server for a while though.

Maybe I confused him with EuphoricBaseball? Or wait were they the same person under different alts?

Baseball's thing wasn't age of consent but the idea that anyone who reached puberty should be legally treated like an adult and be able to skip school, evidently unaware that compulsory schooling laws end at 16 in most states. He also thought that the government shouldn't really treat them like adults and that their parents still had an obligation to take care of them.

Yes, that was one of his alts.

I don't recognize the latter name so couldn't say. But again there's a lot of Branson I didn't read so I wouldn't be shocked if I missed or just forgot about the age of consent angle, which... is interesting to think about, I guess, but never productive to discuss ime. So I'd have pretty much screened it out anyway.

That's a lot of speculative theories and subjective experience that may really just be yours (maybe about 1/3 of research papers I have built on had women first authors, and I'm in a hard theory corner of CS). Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do? Instead, on top of the steamrolling dominance of egalitarian Western society, we are now seeing the ascendancy/imminent superiority of China which at least anecdotally places even more women in competitive tail jobs.

Either way, the picture you paint of the impact of women in the workplace seems nothing short of apocalyptic, so wouldn't you expect at least some examples of societies that don't allow it outperforming those that do?

I would argue that the curve is slow, but parallel Muslim societies are beginning to outcompete Western societies.

I would argue that the curve is slow, but parallel Muslim societies are beginning to outcompete Western societies.

At what? Turkey and Iran are technologically and militarily less dysfunctional than the Arab Muslim states, but that ain't saying much.

Sorry, I had a more detailed response and lost it, but I hope this suffices to give you the point of view I use to think about these things.

He who builds the biggest bridges and the fanciest paved roads is not necessarily going to be the last man standing. There are other very successful strategies for overcoming your neighbor.

The Vandals and the Goths out-competed the Romans. The Seljuk Turks outcompeted the Caliph in Baghdad. The Mongols outcompeted the Chinese, the Persians, the Turks, and the Eastern European principalities.

Those are the obvious military accomplishments, where a significantly less advanced and technological state has the vigor to punch way above its weight class when fighting against more, allegedly, militarily capable states.

There are also other strategies. One might say that the Goths, either wittingly or unwittingly, pursued a strategy of educating their sons in the advanced society of their day, while retaining their essential Goth-ness (by going to clubs), and eventually completing the long destruction of Western Roman society even while they adopted on the surface some of its formalities. What matters here is that the Goths were the last culture standing.

This is obviously an endlessly iterating game, but in this current iteration, I think that the curve might be slow, but the parallel Muslim cultures growing in the West and supported by the Dar-al-Islam, are beginning to outcompete the societies they are embedded in while retaining and even doubling down on their, uhhhh, less than fully feminist laws and cultural traits.

Could this change? Of course. It didn’t take the Chinese very long to out-compete the Mongols via a different strategy, after all. But that strategy is not a silver bullet. The Tatar Yoke wasn’t lifted by the Golden Horde converting to dome-based architecture and Orthodoxy, after all.

So, I don’t count “We have more bridges, McDonalds, and better military toys” as a definitive killer app in the endless war between peoples/nations/cultures.

Mate, not all of the West is the USA. Europe literally ran out of bombs when ousting Gaddafi.

I have a directory of some hundreds of dsp papers from the last 20-30 years I’ve accumulated over time and I’ve at least browsed through if not outright read every single one of them. The number of papers with a female first or second author is less than ten. The ratio has been similar in other subfields of electrical engineering I’ve read papers and books from.

Unsurprising, isn't it? If we normalize for the number of women in EE author positions (let's say grad school and above), I wouldn't have expected more, especially if you have papers from the '90s in that database.

I would have actually expected slightly more just based on the ratio I saw while working in a university lab 20 years ago but not massively so. Certainly nothing close to 30%. Once you account for how the number of useful papers are divided between publishing researchers (something resembling the usual 80-20 thing), the result I got isn't all that surprising.

I have no understanding of that field so I’ll take your word for it. But if you look at open source contributions on GitHub as recently as 2021, which is far from theoretical computer science but is at least something technical and important, women make ~5% of contributions. This study looked at names, and there are many transgender programmers active on GitHub, and they seem to love Linux… so the number of real female contributors may be as low as 1-3%. This is a good metric because it’s technical work for the pure love of technical work.

I dispute that it's such a good metric, because GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).

Hell, even in my personal space, my SO has probably written 5x the volume of shell scripts to automate random chores that I have (my tolerance for annoyances being much higher), but mine are on github with a nice readme and Show HN post to introduce them and hers are not.

it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.

More anecdata, but some of the most mathematically interesting code in one of my favorite open source projects had its first version written by a female programmer, who doesn't have a single commit, because her conditions for being persuaded into contributing were basically "you own the translated code, you don't put my name on it, you don't ask me for support, you don't suggest others ask me for support".

She got like 5 papers and a dissertation for her PhD (which she finished at least 25% faster than I did) out of the research that led to that code, during a period when I was spending a ton of time helping new users of the rest of the software for no immediate personal benefit, so it's hard to say that she was doing the wrong thing, at least in the short run. On the other hand, today those papers have ~140 citations between them, none since 2022; the one paper about the project she was a silent contributor to is over a thousand now, and that's because most users' papers cite a downstream project instead.

GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit)

What do you think is driving useful research if not just that?

Someone just going with the flow isn't going to email their prof with "I've been trying to solve this open research problem but got stuck two thirds of the way, do you maybe have some pointers..." followed with publishing several papers before even considering PhD studies (like I did way back in the day).

GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).

Right, but the former is good! Computing runs on this kind of person. It’s very important if female programmes don’t like to draw attention or be the best at something, and especially if they become the majority of a profession and start discouraging it in men. That’s a big part of Andrews’ point.

Huh. Sounds like the rise of LLMs should disproportionally benefit women. It turns coding from grind into review/discussion and it strongly benefits local development.

Over a long enough timeframe is the operative word you're missing. Now, are there societies which combine female domesticity with a functioning sewage system? I can think of two- the gulf muslim countries(which do not maintain the functioning sewage systems themselves, they spend oil money to buy them wholesale and have indian indentured servants3CNs maintain them) and conservative Christian parallel societies in parts of the west(who likewise support themselves through productive labor but generally rely on the more egalitarian society around them to maintain a modern developed society). Maybe Italy and Japan are partial examples, but they demonstrate pretty conclusively that this is not a magic bullet for TFR.

Most of Central and Southeast Asia has functioning sewage and maintains it themselves, along with female domesticity.

Now, are there societies which combine female domesticity with a functioning sewage system?

Well, what is the cause and what is the effect there, though? It's suspicious that even for well-sewered Western society, by the time proper sewer systems proliferated, female workforce participation was already most of the way to the modern value. (Quick Google says 56% for the US now, and 40% for Victorian England.)

I don't think TFR>2.1 is compatible with affluent liberal modernity without speculative innovations in the class of artificial wombs and AI childrearing with no humans in the loop, so I'd rather just enjoy its boons while they last. We'll have to destroy freedom and fun to get TFR up eventually anyway; why be in a hurry about it?

Israel would disagree; as until recently would Utah. It's clearly possible to have affluent, modern societies which replace themselves and have basic equal rights.

I don't know enough about Utah, but I would assume Israeli fertility is nontrivially carried by subgroups that are not living in affluent liberal modernity. Maybe, assuming that the subgroups are not actually genetically distinct from the general population and have a steady rate of evaporation (as in children who leave the group and join modernity), such a strategy could be viable - maintain a self-sequestering pronatalist cult, and keep the rest of society running on a steady trickle of apostates from their circles - but it hardly seems stable, especially since I assume evaporative cooling will cause the cult to drift genetically towards who knows what over time.

Israeli society has a large percentage of the population with normal jobs, electronic communication, and 4+ kids. It's not all ultra-orthodox.

Considering the figures on the Wikipedia page, with the sub-replacement values for "Christians" and "others", I'm inclined to believe that whatever they are doing at least does not work as a society-wide intervention. "Jewish non-Haredi" is already given as only 2.4, and I assume that there is a large number of sufficiently aberrant lifestyle people (like settlers) in that group pulling up the average without resembling "affluent liberal modernity".

I mean, sure, with a sufficiently compelling religion you will find some people willing to live on a farm and multiply for your ethnoreligious group's manifest destiny; the fraction of people willing to do that might however not be that large, and Israel already has an easier time there because their baseline Jewish population is preselected for propensity to go for such a thing from a much larger global Jewish population. I'm however not convinced that that group could sustain itself even at its current level of lifestyle without a much larger and lower-TFR group subsidising them. I'm in fact not even convinced that Israel as a state could sustain itself at its current level of lifestyle without the much larger and lower-TFR group that is the USA subsidising them. Israel's TFR is also secured by weapons and money built by/earned by Americans burning their fertile years in the rat race at Raytheon.

"Egalitarian" societies have really not been around long in the grand scheme of things and the wheels are already clearly coming off with cratering TFR and solutions like mass migration causing massive destabilization. If anything the fact that no society that put women in this position ever lasted long enough to become dominant until after the industrial revolution seems to paint a pretty different picture of whether this is a positive thing. At current rates Europe will be ruled by patriarchal muslims in a couple centuries and the US by the amish.

Well, that sucks, but all the counterproposals look an awful lot like "we should turn into patriarchal muslims/amish with a different paint job first".

Besides, in a couple centuries, I wager both Europe and the US will either be ruled by Clippy or members of whatever type of cockroach (literal or metaphorical) emerges from the rubble of WWIII, and in the latter case the TFR probem might be solved for Westerners too since erasing industrial society seems like a reliable enough way to get the opportunity costs of childrearing under control.

Well, that sucks, but all the counterproposals look an awful lot like "we should turn into patriarchal muslims/amish with a different paint job first".

Was pre-1960s America/Europe "Muslim/Amish with a different paint job"? I guess if the only thing you care about is women's rights, you might see it that way; but I don't.

Besides, in a couple centuries, I wager both Europe and the US will either be ruled by Clippy or members of whatever type of cockroach (literal or metaphorical) emerges from the rubble of WWIII

It's true that AI is probably going to kill us all first, but in that case nothing matters; all political discussions should be assumed to be Current Rate No Singularity.

Was pre-1960s America/Europe "Muslim/Amish with a different paint job"?

No, but we can't go back to anything like it, because not having invented smartphones and Uber Eats looks very different from upholding a ban on smartphones and Uber Eats and we have neither the coordination nor the technology to just forget a capability.

Again I'd like to point out that the author's proposal is to simply repeal antidiscrimination laws pertaining to sex, which is a much more reasonable objective than dispensing with smartphones, the relevance of which I can't figure out regardless.

Do you think Western civilization just decided to try feminism on a whim, or was it more like feminism arose because we had the capability?

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"Egalitarian" societies have really not been around long in the grand scheme of things and the wheels are already clearly coming off with cratering TFR and solutions like mass migration causing massive destabilization.

I came to this same conclusion and it was a real doompill for me. The kind of modern secular liberal egalitarian democratic system we've been running for the last fifty or sixty years just isn't standing up to the test of time very well. That system has reacted by tabooing any values other than its own, but that hasn't actually fixed anything, and so now we have a decrepit empire rife with heresy.

Everywhere Urban and modern has extremely low fertility not just modern liberal societies.

I came to this same conclusion and it was a real doompill for me.

Really? I felt a tremendous amount of relief. To me it seemed like everything was just getting worse and worse with no end in sight and I had no idea why. When I realized that, oh, we're just insane when it comes to women and race and fixing that will fix pretty much everything else, it was like the horizon began to lighten in the East.

To doompill about this would require me to think that egalitarianism had triumphed in ridding the world of people who can perceive the truth. But it hasn't! Racism and sexism are both alive and well, thank God, and will soon be coming to the rescue of benighted Western Civilization.

The problem in the meantime is that so many positions of consequence are held by people who can't or won't notice what's happened.

This new generation is so strangely split. Young men radical reactionaries; young women radical... uh, I don't even know what to call them. Hateful, shrewish, self-defacing cat-ladies? No idea how this is going to play out politically but it's going to be fascinating, and in the long run I think women will ultimately buckle and follow the lead of men back to a social model which actually works.

When I realized that, oh, we're just insane when it comes to women and race and fixing that will fix pretty much everything else, it was like the horizon began to lighten in the East.

Heuristic: if you find yourself thinking "once we fix [my pet issue], most other problems will solve themselves", that means your mind has been hijacked by a hostile ideology. This is true regardless of the contents of [my pet issue]. This failure mode is more common on the left than the right - usual contents are "capitalism" or "consumerism" or "patriarchy" - but it happens on the right too ("immigration", "atheism", "homosexuality", "political correctness") and even to believers in weird fringe stuff ("prediction markets").

Solid point and I accept it, though in this case my reasoning is more that "Once those problems are solved we'll be back in a position to deal with the others." It's a sort of faith in my heritage.

I could expound on my own subjective view at length, but I think it would be more useful to just say that at some point my vision of the far future went from Star Trek to, I don't know, Dune or something, and I didn't like it.

Funny. I was just wondering why entire subgenres of SciFi and althistory don't work for me anymore as I get more conservative/blackpilled.

"Written with the assumptions of Star Trek in mind" captures the commonalities even across genres surprisingly well.

There's a goldilocks zone between "obnoxiously poisoned by leftism" and "Randian libertarian blowhard" in SciFi.

...I haven't exactly found it yet, but it has to be there.

Heinlein's cocktail of beliefs is at least bizarre enough to be more entertaining than irritating.

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I'm in favor of the move, all things considered.

Star Trek is not a human future. It's a fictional scenario constructed to serve as the vehicle for the political assertions of people laboring under any number of ridiculous misapprehensions about human nature. Humans would have to be substantially modified in all sorts of ways to make that work, and I think we'd lose much of what I value about humans in the process.

Dune looks like a human future full of people living human lives. Most of the 'bad' things in the books are straightforwardly contrived for plot purposes. I think Dune would be a good future. Caladan seems nice. And I don't think most of the Landsraad would actually put up with the Harkonnens except for, again, contrived Imperial support.

But, in such cases, the question one ought to ask is what ruler one is even using to measure 'good' and 'bad'. And if it turns out one's answer is 'the social consensus prevalent when I was young' one is due to have a bad time in short order.

What actually matters to you in the future? What patterns are worthy of preservation and propagation?

FWIW, I don't recall getting any view of the common people's lives in Dune. We know of the high drama of the aristocracy, and the supposed macrohistory, and not much else.

OTOH, I never read past God-Emperor.

Medicine is becoming increasingly feminine, with majority female doctors and med students. This is a global phenomenon, and I lived through it in med school myself. Well, I wasn't really complaining about all the women, as potential dating options, but I imagine India lagged behind in that regard. This didn't have any obvious impact I could see, since senior doctors were still mostly male, and even our women are far less Woke than the West.

In the UK? It's more obvious. I am loathe to make strong statements, since I don't know how much of the cultural differences in the workplace at our hospitals is due to the women, and how much of it is general zeitgeist bleeding through.

I can still say that the men are on tenterhooks, it takes a single complaint to absolutely screw us over. I've seen male consultants treat female trainees with kids gloves solely because of such fears (which are entirely justified), even if the trainee in question hasn't shown any such tendency. I'm talking avoiding being in the same room, for fear that a lack of witnesses will make a potential defense untenable.

Hell, I recall that when I'd circulated a request for feedback to other doctors I worked with (it's mandatory for my portfolio), the only person who left a written comment was an older female trainee who made a pointed comment about a joke I had made (and had even confronted me right after I made it).

This has a chilling effect. I can hardly say that it's killed medicine, which would be hyperbolic, but I am sympathetic to the general thesis.

In the UK? It's more obvious. I am loathe to make strong statements, since I don't know how much of the cultural differences in the workplace at our hospitals is due to the women, and how much of it is general zeitgeist bleeding through.

It’s a complicated issue. In Britain, white doctors and nurses are subject to the extremely common and overrepresented predations of overseas and BAME (the UK term for ethnic minorities, for any readers) doctors and nurses who are extremely overrepresented in sexual harassment and assault claims. Certainly when I read through a bunch of the decisions a few years ago I found that the vast majority of serious sexual misconduct by doctors appeared to involve non-native medical professionals (whether first or subsequent generation).

It’s true for other crimes too. As the GMC itself noted 7 of the 9 doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter since 2004 were BAME. BAME doctors are referred for misconduct at more than double the rate of white doctors. International medical graduates are referred at more than 2.5 times the rate. (The GMC’s solution, in true current year fashion, was to try to fix the disproportionality, which could only be due to racism, not to investigate the cause).

Anecdotally doctor friends report leering, pestering and other sexual harassment by foreign doctors, many of whom speak poor English and have questionable medical skills, and some (eg Pakistani Muslim) domestically trained ones too. Obviously there are many civilized overseas doctors, yourself surely included, but the context is important when looking at why there might be a heightened women’s sensitivity here.

As the GMC itself noted 7 of the 9 doctors convicted of gross negligence manslaughter since 2004 were BAME. BAME doctors are referred for misconduct at more than double the rate of white doctors. International medical graduates are referred at more than 2.5 times the rate. (The GMC’s solution, in true current year fashion, was to try to fix the disproportionality, which could only be due to racism, not to investigate the cause).

In a comparable situation in another industry, it was once pointed out to me that such disproportionality was after everyone in question had already bent over backwards to avoid coming down on the non-whites.

It wasn't that they were ~2.5 times more likely to cause major problems; it was that they were so much more likely to cause problems so bad that they couldn't be swept under the rug.

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 tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

This rhymes with the old "women can't do science because their uterus makes them fundamentally irrational", which has not aged very well.

A (perhaps weak-man) view of a feminism view of international relations would be "for more than two thousand years, politics in Europe were mostly decided by men (->true). As a consequence (->debatable), most state capacity was spent on murdering other humans in wars (->true). As women got more involved in politics, Europe become a lot more peaceful (->the correlation exists). Therefore, it is essential to limit the influence of men in politics lest they use their influence to follow their instinct for murder (->disagree)."

It is not that either view is completely without a point. On average, women are probably likelier to make decisions based on 'feminine' emotions, and men are probably more likely to accept violence as an appropriate solution to a problem.

But even in single-sex organizations, cultures can be very different. An all-male 19th century chess club will have a very different culture from a band of mongol raiders or a squad of SS officers or the retinue of a medieval lord or an all-male fire department or some rapists sharing roofie ingredients or some RPGlers.

Woke culture in the legal profession has obviously not been good for the rule of the law. (Nor has MAGA culture, btw.) But I am very skeptical of the claim that an gender imbalance will naturally cause a culture to flip.

I think there’s a bit of truth to it. Not that no woman is capable of Law work, but that the social style of women is not how law is supposed to work (or things like science or the military (which I fear a bit more than Law simply because the one army that keeps their military masculine will have it’s day with any country with a feminine military)) as it’s supposed to be about the fair and impartial application of rules, whether or not the outcome is one you prefer. Women tend to have a harder time accepting outcomes that feel mean even if the law is fair and the case is judged fairly. Sure a couple of women probably isn’t going to do it, but enough of them to have the circuit courts full of women who see the fair outcome of a jury trial as mean to someone from a disadvantaged group is going to make a shambles of blind and impartial judgement.

I've been a lawyer for over a decade and have worked with many female lawyers, including at the supervisory level, and I can't say that I've ever seen a situation where empathy inappropriately played a role in any attorney's decision, whether male or female. I will grant that I spent a long time doing oil and gas work where it would be difficult to find a situation where empathy would even come into play, but for the past few years I've done litigation work that involves defending unsympathetic companies against suits brought by highly sympathetic plaintiffs, my boss and two other supervising partners are women, and I haven't seen any women ever back off for what would be considered empathetic reasons. The only judge I've ever seen who acted overly sympathetic toward plaintiffs was an 80-year-old white guy in West Virginia. And he's no longer on the bench. I also haven't dealt with many female judges in this context, but the one I have dealt with was more of a stickler for the rules than her male counterparts. I think this, though, is a consequence of her being a judge in a county that doesn't see a ton of these cases and thus hasn't had the opportunity to go on autopilot.

I have certainly seen bad women attorneys, but they were all bad in the same ways that men are bad attorneys: They're lazy and/or sloppy. There are a few male plaintiff's attorneys I deal with who will let my client out of the case at the slightest resistance, because not doing so would mean that they have to argue a motion. But talking about empathy in the context of practicing law doesn't make sense, because a large percentage of law is purely transactional, and in litigation your job is to defend the interests of your client, and being able to empathize with your client is a good thing, not a bad thing. It certainly prevents the laziness from taking over. And in judicial contexts, there are two sides to every story. You seem to be making the argument that women would be more empathetic to a defendant from a disadvantaged group. But why would this be the case? If empathy is the overriding factor, they might just as easily be overly empathetic toward the victim.

Which brings me to my final point: Even if your premise is correct, and female judges will be empathetic to criminal defendants, you're basing your conclusion on the idea that there is some kind of Platonian "correct" outcome, and that male judges consistently achieve this outcome. What constitutes a correct outcome is a political question and not a legal one in instances where the judge has discretion, like sentencing, and the appropriate response would be for legislatures to revise sentencing guidelines if sentences become too lenient. But beyond that, there's the possibility as well, that male judges are simply too harsh, and that the overriding goal of public safety is ill-served by oversentencing; maybe it's the women judges who are closer to achieving the policy goals the criminal code exists to implement. I'd be a little more cautious before going down the overly reductive road that a legal system that is majority women will somehow cause the whole thing to go to shit, just because it conforms to whatever stereotypes or personal policy preferences that you have.

I googled and spent all of two minutes not finding stats on this but my perception (dated now) was that women made up large majority of grads who went into public interest law

Women tend to have a harder time accepting outcomes that feel mean even if the law is fair and the case is judged fairly

I can acknowledge that women have different social styles than men on average, but I don't think this is it. Of course women can be mean and spiteful, sometimes out of proportion. Were you oblivious to how female bullying works in school? Or never seen "fury like a woman scorned"? "Anti-mean" is merely a surface cultural local pretended norm, which can be ignored or circumvented when required. Also can become permanently shifted (there totally are cultures where women are mean to someone from a disadvantaged group).

If I had to guess, the female predisposition is to present agreeableness to local cultural social norms. It includes also policing them, but socially in a way that avoids confrontation that can escalate to violence. Likewise, there is also bias to favor women and their experiences ("believe women"), but I am not certain its anything inherit, it is likely a product of feminist education.

From this perspective, one can steelman that justice system can turn out quite differently when it becomes feminized. Court procedure is bit like a fair fight with a words. You have a right to confront the witnesses against you and all that. Perhaps there will be pressure to avoid that.

"Anti-mean" is merely a surface cultural local pretended norm, which can be ignored or circumvented when required.

Correct; the actual norm is who/whom.

From this perspective, one can steelman that justice system can turn out quite differently when it becomes feminized. Court procedure is bit like a fair fight with a words. You have a right to confront the witnesses against you and all that. Perhaps there will be pressure to avoid that.

Yes, see the Title IX tribunals, for instance.

as it’s supposed to be about the fair and impartial application of rules, whether or not the outcome is one you prefer

Yes, but doing that actively handicaps women in the workplace, because their evolutionary specialty rests on those rules being as partial and obfuscated as possible.

The fact that that the full use of that specialty is incredibly destructive is highly relevant, which is why gynosupremacists build their entire worldview atop justifications for being allowed to do it. It's what their instincts tell them will keep them safe. Parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy (and must be considered morally neutral for this analysis to have any worth).

to someone from a disadvantaged group

I think a start to dealing with this would be to institutionally account for the moral hazard this inherently creates. If women want criminals running around because to do otherwise would hurt their feelings, there needs to be some redistribution directly from them to the people their policies hurt. If the teaching profession refuses to do its job by literacy rates dropping because it would be mean to fail people, there's no reason they shouldn't be forced to pay into a dividend dedicated to fixing their mistake in the future.

Society doesn't impose costs on morally neutral behaviour. Also you are suggesting a 'host' solution, you will only get justifications for why it can't be done in return. This would not be possible even if you hadn't brought in the concept of parasitism, now it is double plus infinity not possible.

I hate this framing. And I'm not just saying that because I'm trying to romance 2rafa. You can't just say 'just treat this loaded term as neutral' when you're talking about societal issues, because society isn't just made up of autistic wordcels like us. That said, I'm pretty much willing to talk about anything, so I can't help but notice that I don't want to talk about this in these terms. It probably means you could make bank off of championing this on social media - at least until you are debanked.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm trying to romance 2rafa.

LOL very tempted to tag her. But I won't. This time...

Society doesn't impose costs on morally neutral behaviour.

Of course it does. This is what many taxes and fees are.

Ah God damn it. You're right, I meant to say it doesn't impose costs as a deterrent on morally neutral behaviour.

If the behavior is morally neutral but has costs, a tax or fee might well be imposed upon it not to deter it but to recover said costs.

Right and that's why my argument continued for several sentences after that first one.

Just for clarification, I'm reading this as 'doesn't intend to impose costs...'

Yeah, I think that's probably true. Happens all the time, but not with that conscious intent.

You can't just say 'just treat your outgroup as mistake theorists'

As opposed to treating them as conflict theorists, but there's no insight to be gained by starting from that position.

parasitism

I don't think the tarantula hawk wasp is consumed by guilt at what it has to do to continue its cycle of existence. Not that it has the capacity to feel guilt, of course.

Thus, a particular assumption relevant to my outgroup's behavior- that [at its core] it is an evil animal with evil motivations designed solely to maximize the suffering of others for selfish gain- is therefore flawed and not worth talking about.

Of course, if that hypothetical question ever came up between host and parasite, how would you mediate a dispute between them? Not that a host could conduct that process when parasite-obsessed [for a variety of out-of-scope reasons] hosts are in oversupply, of course, which debanking is an expression of and why it's only become a thing now.

I agree, but I want to present a different way of looking at it: Men and women are offended by different things.

Within the typically-male psyche, there is a revulsion against certain behaviours instilled by evolution. Someone downthread described how male animals (especially mammals) use competition rituals to battle for dominance without being injured. The idea is to work out the dominance hierarchy without wasting too much energy on infighting, and to emerge from that with a strong coalition that can be used to fight the next battle. Men feel revulsion at anything that deviates from this.

Key point: There is always a next battle. The need to balance victory in this battle with continued strength afterward. This gives rise to a beautiful tapestry of complex psychology. Forgiveness becomes a martial virtue, because sometimes the winning strategy is to ally with A against B and then B against A. Loyalty becomes a complex and many-faceted thing; loyalty to a state or a crown can adapt to the needs of a situation more effectively than loyalty to a person; for example, a patriotic Frenchman like Talleyrand managed to be loyal to the Bourbons, the Revolution, Emperor Napoleon, and then the restored Bourbons again in quick succession. Battles become more perfunctory and symbolic the more sophisticated the combatants become, as opposing sides are increasingly able to predict the outcome of a fight and skip to the end without killing each other.

Male psychology is the product of a literal evolutionary arms race, one that has given rise both to warfare and to most of politics.

A few images to think about: In medieval Italy, armies of mercenaries fought wars of maneuver on behalf of city-states. Opposing armies would compete for strategic positions and supply lines, then whichever side lost would often give up without fighting - both sides being mercenaries, they took a pragmatic view of war. In ancient Rome, Julius Caesar made a show of forgiving politicians who sided against him in the civil wars, which is a big part of how he was able to take so much power so quickly after winning just a few battles (but then the enemies he forgave assassinated him).

Men have a culturally mediated disgust reaction against dishonorable conduct. Executing prisoners, attacks that violate the local rules of warfare, assassinations, these things are regarded as unacceptable. They happen, of course (there would be no evolved reaction if they didn't) but note the common result: Instant and massive loss of legitimacy. I recall a certain Roman emperor who schemed against his brother; when the Praetorians found out what their leader was up to, they rose up and hacked him to pieces.

If your leader gets caught breaking the rules you and your fellow men fly into a rage and murder him on the spot. Think about how intense of a psychological reaction that is.

Women aren't programmed to work like that, generally. Female chimpanzees are much less active in coalitions to overthrow the alpha chimp, and likewise with female humans. They don't have as much of an evolutionary benefit in terms of number of expected offspring from rising up and overthrowing their leaders. They don't have a longstanding need to mediate dominance contests because they don't have the same need to fight an internal war followed in quick succession by a bunch of external wars. A male coalition that weakens itself by infighting will be displaced by rival males; a female coalition that weakens itself by infighting has no such risk because female coalitions don't invade and displace each other. The whole reason to evolve that pattern of behaviour doesn't exist.

The coming war against outsiders is equivalent to the mission of the organization. A male coalition battles for dominance and then organizes itself and conquers new territory. A female coalition battles for dominance within the existing territory and never tries to expand. In a business or a government where the 'conquest' means capturing market share or winning new voters, that kind of stagnation is poisonous.

Executing prisoners, attacks that violate the local rules of warfare, assassinations, these things are regarded as unacceptable.

Codes of honour differ in different societies, and those are male-run societies as well. There are very few universal rules that all cultures accept. Politics means friends today, enemies tomorrow. Spying may be disgusting and dishonourable, but you need a secret service. And that includes state assassinations of the bothersome:

The goals of the secret service, in Arthashastra, was to test the integrity of government officials, spy on cartels and population for conspiracy, to monitor hostile kingdoms suspected of preparing for war or in war against the state, to check spying and propaganda wars by hostile states, to destabilize enemy states, to get rid of troublesome powerful people who could not be challenged openly. The spy operations and its targets, states verse 5.2.69 of Arthashastra, should be pursued "with respect to traitors and unrighteous people, not with respect to others".

Political advisers may recommend the role of virtue, but they always have a touch of Machiavelli about them, as see Chanakya (the so-called "Indian Machiavelli") and the popular legends that grew up around him:

Chanakya had two potential successors to Dhana Nanda: Pabbata and Chandragupta. He gave each of them an amulet to be worn around the neck with a woolen thread. One day, he decided to test them. While Chandragupta was asleep, he asked Pabbata to remove Chandragupta's woolen thread without breaking it and without waking up Chandragupta. Pabbata failed to accomplish this task. Some time later, when Pabbata was sleeping, Chanakya challenged Chandragupta to complete the same task. Chandragupta retrieved the woolen thread by cutting off Pabbata's head. For the next seven years, Chanakya trained Chandragupta for imperial duties.

Picking someone as future emperor on the basis of "ruthlessness in achieving objectives, including murder" is not really inclining towards "dishonour is the worst thing of all!"

I recall a certain Roman emperor who schemed against his brother; when the Praetorians found out what their leader was up to, they rose up and hacked him to pieces.

The same Praetorian Guard that was behind the assassinations of god knows how many emperors?

I know. I described just such an event. See: Emperor hacked to pieces by Praetorian Guard.

You'll forgive me for being skeptical that this particular assassination happened because the Guard suddenly developed a moral compass.

I didn't say they did. I said they exhibited an evolved primate behaviour that caused them to fly into a mass hysterical rage and commit regicide in response to perceived violations of the rules of their honor-based society. What part of that sounds like developing a moral compass?

Hmmm, rules of their society, a set of norms, we could almost call that a system of morality. And all this is moot because the Guard were far more concerned about naked power grabs than codes of honor. They literally auctioned off the throne after assassinating Pertinax.

Where there is a tremendous correlation between toxic cancel culture and the feminization of universities, correlation is not necessarily causation. The toxic cancel culture we are seeing could be caused by other factors, such as people interacting online more and in person less: I have observed that getting behind a screen makes people ruder and less pleasant.

Toxic cancel culture is one response to what I call the “troll bait” issue: Certain ideas, which are unpopular with mainstream society, get a certain loud minority all worked up. For example, Super Audio CDs had a small but fanatic userbase who were convinced conventional CDs sounded harsh and digital, but didn’t have any real scientific evidence to back up their assertions. The correct response to bad troll bait ideas is not to shame people for having opinions we don’t like, but to present more facts showing that they are wrong (this is how we kept the SACD article under control, since the evidence showed that people can not distinguish CD quality audio from a wire).

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it?

This paragraph is amazing. As if the primary characteristic of people who are oriented towards the sole goal of 'open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth' is their gender! A small proportion of academic communities in history have managed to take this kind of pure truth seeking as their goal. To see gender as the main faultline of truthseeking vs other interests is identity politics at its worst.

The point is not that men in general are dedicated to truth-seeking. The point is that of the small proportion of people dedicated to truth seeking, nearly all of them are men. This is something progressives actually seem to agree on, as their pitch is often "The characteristics of this environment which make it dedicated to truth-seeking are offputting to women, therefore they most go" Not in so many words, usually, but rather often damned close.

The point of articles like this is absolutely to glaze men as truth-seekers. They’re not written for Joe the Plumber, but for the kind of guy who shares anti-feminist thinkpieces.

“Imagine the world run by people who think like you!”

Perhaps the sort of guy who shares anti-feminist thinkpieces is also the sort of guy who is dedicated to truth-seeking.

Quite possible.

A progressive is hardly going to agree that the truth-seeking traits are the same ones as the female-excluding traits.

Not usually in the same paragraph, anyway. Occasionally in the same article.

This is something progressives actually seem to agree on

Because truth-seeking can, and historically often does, have a natural consequence of breaking the conditions that keep a feminine society comfortably in power. This can be on the low side, where what is revealed gives an advantage to men, or it can be on the high side, where what is revealed gives such a disadvantage to men that their economic value drops close enough to 0 that they start killing each other.

Normally, that just means they get conquered by masculine societies (whose power has different constraints), but there really aren't very many of those around these days.

I don't think the average progressive is intelligent enough to fully realize that, but the same goes for the average traditionalist. The same instinct silently instructs both on how to assert and protect a monopoly on truth- that's what those 3 Moral Foundations absent from truth-seeker morality do.

but there really aren't very many of those around these days.

China, Russia, the Muslim world, India, the Latin American world, Africa. Basically everywhere except Burgerland and Europe.

The Latin American elite is actually pretty woke, and the peasants don't really have a lot of say in these societies. Latin America is very much not based and trad.

Sure, but if we are just talking about what percentage of the societal elite (doctors, lawyers, judges, finance, business, politicians, military officers) are women, all those places I listed are going have much lower percentages than America or Western Europe.

Upper middle class women in Latin America do not face any meaningful pressure to stay home and cook, even if casual sexism often plays well with the general public. These are not blue collar mexican immigrants to the US where women are still expected to prioritize wife skills over career, even if working full time. To use doctoring as a random example, all of the big countries in Latin America graduate more female than male doctors by a significant margin- the closest I found after a quick google search was Peru at 54%. Google indicates that Mexican medical school graduates were majority female starting in 1995.

No doubt, there is a very similar effect to the US where top flying surgeons, full professors, etc are more male than the profession as a whole. But these are societies where upper-middle class females are if anything even more girlboss oriented than the US.

that and they have (had) ministries of women in countries like Argentina, and in countries like Mexico they practice DEI even in politics, where "plurinominal" house representatives are selected based on gender (not even based on sex).

In September, I gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference along the lines of the essay above. I was apprehensive about putting forward the Great Feminization thesis in such a public forum.

That's the problem right there. This lady should step down and stop taking a place that rightfully belongs to a man, with the masculine qualities of rationality, risk, and competition, rather than cluttering up organisations and forcing them to stagnate with her feminine qualities of empathy, safety, and cohesion.

She should know her place and be content with being a secretary to the (male, of course) "senior editor at The American Conservative" and the "...managing editor of the Washington Examiner." Imagine the effrontery of this lady to take over such senior roles! Much better suited to support roles to enable the man to function efficiently as she uses those feminine qualities to ensure good office manners.

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I'd agree (and do in spirit) but in this case I think our civilization is so sick that it requires such as this. A man isn't allowed to say what she's saying.

The woman is complaining the system is broken; expecting her to keep functioning according to the old system's rules isn't catching her in hypocrisy.

it's hypocrisy if you say "the important professions, including journalism, have been taken over by women and this is bad for society" while holding senior positions in journalism as a woman. It's the alcoholic surgeon: "drinking is bad for you, you should give it up" "but you show up for work drunk every day!" "yeah well do as I say, not as I do". Who wants an alcoholic surgeon, no matter the level of their qualifications, operating on them? How am I to believe her cure for society's ills when she is taking jobs from men?

(That reminds me back when my class was fourteen and having debates on 'how to solve unemployment?' and one notion we got was "all the married women should stop working, that would then free up jobs for men". Yeah, it doesn't work like that. Society now requires both partners in a couple to be working, else you can kiss any chance of a mortgage, for one example, good-bye).

it's hypocrisy if you say "the important professions, including journalism, have been taken over by women and this is bad for society" while holding senior positions in journalism as a woman. It's the alcoholic surgeon: "drinking is bad for you, you should give it up" "but you show up for work drunk every day!" "yeah well do as I say, not as I do".

Your "if" is doing all the work here and deserves no credit. That's not what the author's saying.

Let me break this down for you:

According to her there are (most) women, who do not fit into such organizations naturally and will disrupt and subvert them if too many join. There are also other (few) women who fit naturally into such organizations and create little to no 'gender-drag' regardless of how many join.

She's in favor of repealing the massively-pro-female regulations, which she thinks will allow many of the latter sort to join, which is good, and almost none of the former sort, which is also good, resulting in healthier organizations staffed by both the men and the women who belong there.

She wants more of the second type of woman in the institutions, not fewer. So her being part of such an institution is in keeping with her ethos.

So her being part of such an institution is in keeping with her ethos.

She presumes she is the Good Type of Woman, but what if she is not? What if the meritocratic male workplace decides she is a drag on the organisation? It's very easy to plan out the golden age of the future when you imagine you will be one of the rulers, not one of the ruled. Same problem with all the "after the revolution, what will your job on the commune be?" fantasies.

Daily reminder that housewives, while not the norm, are by no means rare enough to make the blanket statement that 'society requires both partners in a couple to be working'.

The entire move towards the "feminised workplace" (which is one with a better work-life balance and accommodation for working parents) is because many women are both housewives and working outside the home.

That reminds me back when my class was fourteen and having debates on 'how to solve unemployment?' and one notion we got was "all the married women should stop working, that would then free up jobs for men".

Oh to be 14 again, when I didn't know the difference between the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate.

I think the author is saying that she is smart and got her position through merit, and is willing to prove it, but she thinks most women in high positions did not. Does this make her kind of an asshole? Hell yes but she did say she's a disagreeable sort of person.

Sure, but if the argument is that "society is becoming too feminised", then it doesn't matter if she got her position on merit: she's one of the feminising forces. Her argument rests on "I'm different" which, uh, is not very convincing: the only women who should have male jobs are women who behave like men. Fine, great, but how do we get women who behave like men? Because she starts off with the difference between male qualities and female qualities, which is biological essentialism and which does boil down to "there may be some exceptions in women who behave like men, but in general don't hire women because too many women in the professions spoils the profession".

So again I have to ask: what is the correct ratio of men to women in any job, profession, or field? How many is "too many"? What is the tipping point? And the only way to be sure (maybe the tipping point comes at 51% women to 49% men, but maybe it comes at 33% women to 66% men! we don't know!) is to have no women in the profession, or at least not above a relatively low level. Lots of female secretaries, to lots of male bosses. Lots of nurses, to lots of male doctors. Lots of kindergarten teachers, to lots of male professors.

If she is the mother of sons fearful for them in a feminised world, then she has to give the example of stepping down to be replaced by a man. And if she doesn't do that, then her argument is the old problem that feminism has dealt with before: pulling the ladder up behind you. She's okay, she's One Of The Boys, she values all the male values so it's okay for her to get that senior position, but other women just aren't the right fit, not trustworthy, too... female.

I am confused whether she thinks merit is a separate quality from masculinity. E.g. could you have lots of extremely talented women who get a job on merit but then, by their fundamentally feminine traits and preferences, ruin the workplace nonetheless? Or are merit and maleness the same thing to her, in which case you could safely allow a whole bunch of very 'male'-leaning women like her into a workplace, as long as you vetted them carefully?

I think in the latter scenario she can probably unhypocritically keep her job, it's just she'll also have to adopt a notion of merit that is divorced from ability to directly perform a job function, and is instead all about degree of fit to a male workplace culture.

She does seem to be pushing for "merit = maleness", even if she puts in a few quibbles here and there. That's why I think this article is not well thought out or well presented. She may well have a better argument, and perhaps that will be in her book.

Though looking at the blurb about her book, I think a lot of the questions I have are answered by her being a Millennial. I'm (early)Gen X/(late)Boomer, depending where you start counting from, and of course our experiences as women in society/the workplace are different*. Especially if she's complaining about "them rotten Boomers what ruined our futures!" Yes, dear, weren't you the one who wanted the cut-and-thrust of competition and meritocracy? Not to have things handed to you on a plate because of the Nanny State?

With their overthrow of tradition and authority, the Baby Boomers claim to have been humanity’s greatest liberators, but their children would happily trade some of that so-called liberation for a little less debt, the chance to own a home before fifty, and a shot at extracting some commitment from the bosses and romantic partners who view their relationships as temporary. In Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, millennial journalist Helen Andrews calls the Boomers to account. Inspired in part by Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, she presents profiles of luminaries who promised much but failed to deliver.

Commitment from bosses? What a female-oriented view of the workplace!

*I think Helen would be highly insulted by Inspector Monkfish's view of her place, but that attitude really was around in the 70s. Of course, she wasn't even born then.

I am confused whether she thinks merit is a separate quality from masculinity.

She thinks they're highly-correlated in practice, in traditionally-male fields.

E.g. could you have lots of extremely talented women who get a job on merit but then, by their fundamentally feminine traits and preferences, ruin the workplace nonetheless?

No, because part of 'merit' here is 'not acting in typically-feminine ways which ruin the workplace.'

Or are merit and maleness the same thing to her, in which case you could safely allow a whole bunch of very 'male'-leaning women like her into a workplace, as long as you vetted them carefully?

No, not the same thing, but in that case you wouldn't actually need to vet them very carefully. It would simply become the de facto understanding that the workplaces will operate along masculine lines, as they used to when women started entering the workforce. Women would understand this and either self-select out or at least understand that they are to comply with such standards of behavior or face disciplinary action.

I think in the latter scenario she can probably unhypocritically keep her job, it's just she'll also have to adopt a notion of merit that is divorced from ability to directly perform a job function, and is instead all about degree of fit to a male workplace culture.

No. Implicit in her take is that male workplace culture is itself more meritorious and will naturally outcompete female workplace culture.

So that's her take as I understand it.

Personally I'm not convinced. I don't think it's so easy to just 'treat women like men'. We're biologically hardwired to treat women differently and it's upsetting to almost everyone when women are held to male standards.

As a business owner myself, I prefer to assign female employees to accounts that I expect will go poorly. This is because if I send a man and things go poorly we're fired. If I send a woman and things go poorly "We love her, she's great" and "She works so hard" and "Yeah she's making steady progress, we'll get you more funding." Great stuff as a business owner. You can be sure that even if the regulations were dropped I'd keep hiring women!

It does cause me to reflect upon my own hiring standards. From my perspective the only way for a business, such as the one I describe taking advantage of above, to protect itself would be to demand that I send a man instead of a woman in the first place. Admitting a woman to the position at all is implicitly admitting several potential time-bombs. Presumably this works back around to implying that the value of female labor is inherently somewhat lower even with most else being equal. Interesting.

Anyway the author makes a great moderate case and I'd be happy to see us moving toward her policy proposals.

If she is the mother of sons fearful for them in a feminised world, then she has to give the example of stepping down to be replaced by a man. And if she doesn't do that, then her argument is the old problem that feminism has dealt with before: pulling the ladder up behind you. She's okay, she's One Of The Boys, she values all the male values so it's okay for her to get that senior position, but other women just aren't the right fit, not trustworthy, too... female.

Madame -- I'm assuming based on what occurs to me as cattiness and barely-disguised passive-aggressive hysteria but lmk if I'm wrong -- this is a strawman.

Her argument is that if we just took the thumb off the scale and left things to meritocracy the system would balance itself out naturally. She's not positing an optimal number of women. She's saying that the women who belong would fit in and the ones who don't would fall out as a matter of course because Men and Women Who Get Things Done wouldn't be forced to put up with them.

More to the point, she's talking about the ones who behave the way you're behaving right now.

There is no hypocrisy here, only what occurs to me as an unfortunate lack of self-awareness on your part.

the system would balance itself out naturally. She's not positing an optimal number of women. She's saying that the women who belong would fit in and the ones who don't would fall out as a matter of course

Yes, and what are the qualities of "women who fit in"? What are the number of women who would remain and the number of women who would be pushed out? If I'm planning the office Christmas party, I need to know "how many are coming?" and a vague answer like "the ones who will be fun will come, the wet blankets will stay at home" is no good. She wants to revise the current world of work and indeed society as a whole.

You need a plan for that, not just "oh well the Right People will show up".

(I feel it's particularly ironic that I'm doing the male virtue thing of asking for facts, figures, and concrete plans, while you all are doing the female virtue thing of feelings, relying on coincidence, and 'it'll all work out in the end').

But "it'll work itself out" is exactly how that kind of deregulated meritocracy is meant to work, and arguably works. In that context, positing or demanding quotas, as you seem to do, is trivially absurd.

What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?

(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)

(It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects, but perhaps those women are more masculine?)

To give an example of some of the stuff @TitaniumButterfly is talking about, here's the way the tertiary entrance rank worked in Victoria (where I live) when I was in year 12 (back in the oughties!).

You do four or more subjects, and get a score of 0-50 for each. Languages other than English (LotEs) get a +5 to their score; uni-level subjects get a +5 to their score. Then you add up your top four subjects' scores, and add on 10% of your fifth- and sixth-highest scores. So far, so good.

Except that English is required to be counted as one of your best four, and LotEs can count as one of the top four (and you can do more than one, for a theoretical maximum of +16) while uni-level subjects can't (and you can only do one of them, for a theoretical maximum of +0.5).

Guess what sex does better at English and other languages (my score for English was 15 points lower than the worst of my other six subjects*). Guess what sex is more likely to be doing uni-level science in year 12 (I'd have done two - physics and maths - if I could). Girls' best subjects are prioritised over boys' when calculating the TER, which means yes, you will wind up with more girls than boys qualifying for competitive uni positions, including science courses which have nothing to do with year 12 English (i.e. writing essays about Hamlet or the linguistic differences of Aboriginal English) or LotEs. This is not meritocracy - not, at least, when talking about sex disparities.

*Actually, I'm like 70-80% sure that I failed English outright (which doesn't count as a score at all, and means you can't graduate), but my English teacher fudged the paperwork. Not that it wasn't justified after the complete trainwreck my life was at that point, but this demonstrates even further how wide the gulf was between that and my other subjects.

My understanding is that there are two main thrusts:

  1. Masculinity in the workplace and other similar institutions like school has been banned to a great degree. This prevents men from competing on an even playing field.

  2. Equivalent forms of femininity have not only not been banned, but are encouraged and given the legal power of law in many instances, which further tilts the field in those directions.

If we rectified the situation in either way, the argument is that the fields would sort themselves out in a fairly efficient manner.

As I said elsewhere, I find her diagnoses of the problem to be probably correct, but her overall conclusions and solutions underdeveloped.

What would your argument be for why meritocratic hiring would be likely to prevent feminisation? Is it that the high-merit candidates are low on feminine traits, regardless of their gender?

Generally yes if we consider part of 'merit' to be 'psychological compatibility with a competitive work environment.' I.e. able to participate in direct debate rather than shy away and seek consensus.

It seems meritocratic university entrance is leading to more women than men in many subjects

University is a bad joke at this point and partly for this reason. The rough IQ required to 'graduate university' now is lower than the rough IQ required to graduate high school a few decades ago; in that sense, at least, a university degree means less than a high school diploma did fairly recently.

Absurd feminized departments abound. I've seen published 'mathematics' papers that were substantially just the author talking about their feelings re: how hard they perceive being female (or black, etc.) in Math. History, psychology, genetics, pretty much anything outside of hard science has become infantilized, feminized, sanitized of female-triggering content. Why would men want to go into that? Why would we expect to do well in it? How could we respect ourselves while playing along?

I had no end of fighting with my professors over their ridiculous feminized/marxist positions when I was in college, and that was decades ago. At this point it's a massive humiliation ritual for men and especially white men. It's a tremendously-hostile environment and while some men are willing to put up with it a lot of others are not. Personally I dropped out and started a business after the sheer wall of feminine condescension became more than I cared to submit myself to.

For straight while males, starting our own companies is one of the last best ways to live a life mostly-free of feminized nonsense. Until they start to get too successful, at which point the (wo)Man steps in and tells us the party's over and it's time to make everything a dysfunctional daycare again.

Really would have preferred not to be a serial entrepreneur but here we are.

it's hypocrisy if you say "the important professions, including journalism, have been taken over by women and this is bad for society" while holding senior positions in journalism as a woman.

Not really, since "taking over" requires more than one person. The explanation given for why women taking over journalism is bad for society does not imply that having any women in journalism is bad for society. Having some women may be good, and not all women are like other women. Presumably, given the explanation, having highly effeminate men "take over" journalism might be expected to have similar bad consequences for society.

I would expect that having childcare taken over by men would be bad for society, but that doesn't mean that no men should be involved in childcare, nor that some men are not psychologically well-suited to it. If such a man were to complain about there being too many men in childcare (or, rather, childcare becoming too masculanized, because there are too many manly men taking over), that would not be hypocritical.

The laughable solution to Mrs. Andrews' dilemma is to have only transwomen in those jobs. Like software engineers, best of both worlds: male interests, male socialisation, female presentation!

Unfortunately, no. While some transwomen are like that, a lot go for a rather ridiculous caricature of female socialization.

it's hypocrisy if you say "the important professions, including journalism, have been taken over by women and this is bad for society" while holding senior positions in journalism as a woman.

It's not, really, and even if it were, it wouldn't mean it was incorrect. Drinking to excess is bad for you even if a drunk tells you so.

As I've often put it- I have no problem with those who smoke cigarrettes, but I've never heard one recommend the habit, so I don't.

Yes, drinking to excess is bad, which is why the drunk is in the wrong. You can't be both "don't drink" and "I am a drunk", and if the drunk persists in being a drunk, you get rid of them. You don't let the drunk pilot fly the plane or the drunk surgeon operate, and that's the argument she's making: women dominating the professions is harmful, female-values dominating society is harmful.

So the answer is "get the women out of the professions", the same way you would get the drunks out of air traffic control or operating heavy machinery.

You can't be both "don't drink" and "I am a drunk."

Yes you can. What could possibly be wrong with that? It is clearly possible for one person to believe both statements simultaneously - for instance, an alcoholic who got drunk and now regrets it. Why would you forbid people to say things that they believe, or to provide good advice based on their life experiences?

The answer is "get enough out so that the ones with female values don't dominate". She's one person, not a group big enough to dominate, and she may not necessarily have female values.

If progressive white males can complain about white males (presumably excluding themselves), women can say this.

She's one person, but one of the wrong sort of people by her own argument. "I'm not like the other girls" never works. If the problem is "too many women", then you can't take the risk of carving out exceptions for "just this one woman here".

Only Nixon could go to China.

Speak plainly, please, and respond charitably. The article directly addresses what I take to be your sarcastically-expressed criticism. If you do not think it addresses your objection sufficiently, you should explain that clearly and effortfully. Mockery does not raise the level of discourse.

What makes you think this is sarcasm? I am going to the logical end of her argument. Granted, it's a reductio ad absurdum but it does follow on from what she claims.

(Also, I get to luxuriate in the gender essentialism of it all. You, dear mod, can't understand what is going on when it's woman versus woman! You are man-brained with man qualities and man virtues, you have no idea what the mysteries of the feminine mind entail, so you cannot intervene in our disagreement! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 This is not a matter of rationality, which is something reserved clearly and solely for the male of the species, but the mystic crystal revelation of feminine intuition and the rest of the blah Mrs. Andrews argues herself: "In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies." Step back and lemme get on with the undermining in my sneaky female way!)

If the professions are becoming increasingly feminised, if many are now majority female, if society is following suit and this will lead to disaster, then she is part of the rot herself. It doesn't matter if she's trying to argue "oh no, I got here on merit". It doesn't matter if she's One of the Good Ones. It doesn't matter if I'm Not Like Other Girls. By entering formerly male-dominated/majority male professions, she is part of the creeping tide of turning them majority female. By taking senior and leadership positions, she is undermining men by displacing male role models for young men and by blocking the career advancement of more senior men. Can she, as a woman, really claim to be able to mentor subordinate male employees and model leadership to them, in the way that is both appropriate and increasingly necessary in today's feminised world?

She should, if she is sincere, step back and step down. But this is the Land Acknowledgement trope. "This territory was unfairly and unjustly taken from the unwilling". "So are you going to give it back?" "Of course not!" So she's being a hypocrite.

Strong words, you say? Nothing more than her own argument turned upon her.

If wokeness really is the result of the Great Feminization, then the eruption of insanity in 2020 was just a small taste of what the future holds. Imagine what will happen as the remaining men age out of these society-shaping professions and the younger, more feminized generations take full control.

...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.

...The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.

...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.

...A lot can be inferred from the way that feminization tends to increase over time. Once institutions reach a 50–50 split, they tend to blow past gender parity and become more and more female. Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.

That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?

Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose. Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out. Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.

Very well then, but what is the "right" or "correct" proportion of men to women in the workplace? What ratio of men to women in a profession or field? Forget meritocracy, because now we're talking about quotas, and those are every bit the fruit of wokeness that she decries. 50/50? Two-thirds male to one-third female? Three-quarters to one-quarter? It depends? Kindergartens should be majority female but going up the scale of schools, we end with high schools majority male teachers (the ladies can teach home economics) and colleges (save for specialised fields like nursing) all-male?

She convicts herself out of her own mouth: "What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome?" And what man wants to work under a lady boss, even if that lady boss is Mrs. Andrews, former senior editor here and former managing editor there? If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem!

I am the mother of sons, who will never reach their full potential if they have to grow up in a feminized world.

And so she should yield the positions she has usurped to the rightful holders, men, and remain within the feminine sphere of domesticity, supporting the man in his career of risk-taking rationality, and raising those sons with the little feminine graces that soften the harsh edges of the competitive, striving male psyche so that they will be gentlemen as well as scholars. Let her lead by example! Has she ever considered she may have benefited from being a diversity hire as per her "anti-discrimination law" example? If she had to compete on strict merit, there were no men better than her? Part of Larry Summers' ill-expressed but not incorrect point about "“different availability of aptitude at the high end” applies just as much to her; it makes little difference that she is competing in the world of letters, since that world not so long ago was majority male and women's talents were held to lie in writing novels, if they must write, rather than factual reporting and scholarship. Even if Mrs. Andrews is smart (for a woman) there are still men out there smarter than her and thus better qualified for those jobs.

Since I am participating in this thread as a moderator, I'm not going to get any further into the substance of the argument than I already have.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Banned one hour for use of emojis.

Okay, that was novel. I don't think I've ever been banned for an hour - it's generally a week or "get the hell outta here, ya bum".

No emojis - gotcha!

My opinion about banning people for using emojis, especially when they are obviously used as a rhetorical device (as opposed to the entire post being written in zoomer brainrot) is: 🤡.

I’m sorry, but we have to apply the rules equally.

There are few things I would support a permaban for, but this is one of them.

Emojis are a plague that must be rooted out by fire and steel.

Banned one hour for use of emojis.

I'm emoji-prone myself but think this is probably a correct standard for this site. Did it become official at some point?

Did it become official at some point?

No, but emojis often fail to meet the standards for effort (particularly when posted without other text) or inflammatoriness, and they are in almost all cases also egregiously obnoxious. I do feel like I've seen at least one of the other mods use emojis on occasion, and I don't think I've dropped a ban on emojis more than a handful of times, though. I think I may even be the only mod who has ever done it. Fortunately, that may be because it has rarely been necessary; people seem to pick up pretty quick that this is not really the venue for that sort of thing.

I think you're both being unfairly piled on, and also kind of missing the point and being a little disingenuous about it (hence the pile-on).

Helen Andrews, from what I can tell, is not arguing that there should be zero women in "male" professions and that all women in such fields should step aside and let a man take her place, let alone is she going full Serena Joy. She is arguing that "feminization" (changing the norms in a field to cater to women's preference) is harmful and contributing to the "wokening" of these fields. This can be true without taking the position "Therefore we should exclude women from these fields."

I understand that you don't like femaleness being associated with lack of rationality, objectivity, or vigorous discourse, but this is hardly a novel argument. Even the most hardcore gender essentialists don't usually claim that no woman can be smart and rational and meritorious, able to hold her own in a male field. Helen Andrews certainly does not seem to be claiming that. If you resent the implication that there are probably relatively few women who should be considered qualified- well, you can't have it both ways and argue as you do against the encroachment of gender ideology (that says gender is a social construct and a man can be a woman) but also object to any implication that sex differences might be disadvantageous.

Yeah, but she nowhere gives a solution to the problem. How to prevent a feminised society? Well the simple and quick answer is: bar women from those jobs and those positions. How many women in a profession is "too many"? If the answer is "compete on meritocracy" then let Mrs. Andrews show that she is better than the men she beat out for the job. That there is no man at all in the entire USA better qualified or better at the job than she is.

I do wish there was more respect given to honour, but men have cast that aside just as fast as women did. See how "honour culture" is not a compliment, but has connotations of inequality and fast resort to violence instead of negotiation. Conflict versus mistake, if you will.

Yeah, but she nowhere gives a solution to the problem. How to prevent a feminised society?

Yes she does, right here:

"Feminization is not an organic result of women outcompeting men. It is an artificial result of social engineering, and if we take our thumb off the scale it will collapse within a generation."

She then goes into some specifics such as getting rid of anti-discrimination laws.

TBH I don't think you read the article; or if you did it was apparently with so much bias that you may as well not have. This is the straightforward answer to the question which your entire blustering performance has revolved around her not answering, thus allowing you to fill in your own preferred boogeyman and cantilever your eye-rolling dismissals out to infinity.

The worst part, to me, is that this would work for you, too, almost anywhere else. But not here, in one of the last remaining places where male modes of discourse are allowed exercise. Hence the downvotes.

I think Andrews has not thought through what she is proposing. She seems to imagine that "taking the thumb off the scale" will mean ladies like her get to keep the positions they have colonised, because she's just so smart and male-brained. I think it's entirely possible that junking anti-discrimination laws will result in "well it was great knowing you, Helen, but we need new blood and new male blood in particular so say hello to Tim, who will be replacing you".

And again, nobody is answering the real question I am genuinely asking: what is the perfect ratio for society? 50/50 male/female? Majority male? The ladies get to run their little cafés and knitwear shops, bless their hearts, while the men do the real work of the world? Given that Andrews is a political commentator amongst other things, I imagine she feels her views, opinions, and insights are valuable, but in the Men's World Redivivus, is there a place for her?

And again, nobody is answering the real question I am genuinely asking: what is the perfect ratio for society? 50/50 male/female? Majority male?

I'm mostly sitting this one out, but I've seen several people answer you: no one knows and it doesn't matter, just stop tipping the scales. What's your answer to: why is this question supposed to matter at all?

It's also a bit strange watching you fight on this particular hill, given how often you make a point of how Catholic you are.

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And again, nobody is answering the real question I am genuinely asking

Because it is patently clear you are not "genuinely asking". You are staking a position of female superiority, and leveling that oh-so-stereotypically-female weapon of scorn at anyone who cares to dispute it and claim that in fact, something about women may be causing problems. There's no answer to that, and no point in trying.

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How many women in a profession is "too many"?

I doubt you can develop a hard and fast rule unless you say "literally any." The thesis seems to be that at some point you reach a critical mass that is "too many." If you don't want to absolutely exclude women but you also believe there shouldn't be so many that they change norms, then you'll have to have some pretty vigorous gatekeeping and resistance to change, which presents its own problems. But the fact that she doesn't have a solution doesn't mean she isn't pointing at a real problem.

If the answer is "compete on meritocracy" then let Mrs. Andrews show that she is better than the men she beat out for the job. That there is no man at all in the entire USA better qualified or better at the job than she is.

How does this follow? Advocates of meritocracy don't usually claim that any given system is going to be a perfect meritocracy. Andrews can believe she is good enough without necessarily believing she's better than literally every other man in the country.

I do wish there was more respect given to honour, but men have cast that aside just as fast as women did. See how "honour culture" is not a compliment, but has connotations of inequality and fast resort to violence instead of negotiation. Conflict versus mistake, if you will.

Honor culture rapidly devolves to "might makes right." Achieving a culture that respects some concept of "honor" but doesn't just use that as an excuse for "do violence to anyone who offends you" is not a problem I think any society has solved.

Andrews can believe she is good enough without necessarily believing she's better than literally every other man in the country.

She also doesn't need to, nor does she need to (as the previous poster) prove "That there is no man at all in the entire USA better qualified or better at the job than she is".

To have perfect meritocracy, she obviously just needs to prove that she's better than the best man in the country who applied for a job in her field and was turned down. She doesn't need to be better than Bari Weiss or Ezra Klein, she just needs to be better than the marginal next-best candidate.

There is room in America for more than one journalist.

This is really an analogous ‘gotcha’ to saying “woke people think society is white supremacist and has too many white people in positions of power, therefore any woke person that doesn’t resign their job so a POC can have it is a hypocrite.” Even among the anti-woke crowd this argument has always been considered poor because even granting its truth, so what? So you have established their inconsistent behavior, you haven’t disproven the claim that society is white supremacist. This is essentially a version of the classic meme “yet you participate in society”

It's like I said: it's the Land Acknowledgement farrago. "Yes the problem is now women are going for men's jobs and there are too many women in those jobs, but not me! I may be a woman but I'm different! It's okay if I have that male-coded job and my sons see me taking a position from a man!" She could start by giving example by stepping down in favour of a guy, but she likes her career too much. So why should other women not like having a career, as well?

I disagree with her but her argument is sawing off the branch on which she sits: if there are too many women in male professions, she's one of the too many women. So what is she going to do about it, apart from telling other women to quit their jobs or not go into that profession in the first place?

Not interested in engaging here but I did want to compliment your excellent use of 'farrago.'

Very well then, but what is the "right" or "correct" proportion of men to women in the workplace? What ratio of men to women in a profession or field? Forget meritocracy, because now we're talking about quotas, and those are every bit the fruit of wokeness that she decries. 50/50? Two-thirds male to one-third female? Three-quarters to one-quarter?

I do not understand where you get this. The author does not call for quotas, but the removal of rules and policies that drive artificially higher representation of women in certain roles.

One reasonable response to that is that it's reasonable to question whether those policies and laws do drive higher representation of women, though it does seems a bit chud-coded to me to claim that progressive policies have been entirely ineffectual.

the removal of rules and policies that drive artificially higher representation of women in certain roles.

Yeah, but before we can say "artificially high" we have to first establish the "natural level" and if we haven't done that, then we can't talk about "there are too many female lawyers".

We absolutely don’t have to establish any kind of natural level. We know for a fact that the national government of the United States is putting a thumb on the scale by creating laws mandating female-friendly workplaces, benefits for woman-owned businesses, encouraging STEM and leadership programs that are open only to women, lighter sentencing, family law preference, Title IX tribunals, maternity policies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s just the Feds.

In the same way, we know for a fact that the Federal government is putting its thumb on the scales for farmers by providing farming subsidies. The present level of farmers and farming done in America is higher than it would be in the absence of those subsidies. I don’t need to tell you that America requires a natural level of precisely 1,348,756 farmers before we can agree on the number of farmers being kept artificially high for policy reasons.

Now, in both these cases, the government of the nation is pursuing policies it, at least nominally, believes to be in its strategic interest. They might be wrong, but those are understandable goals.

Andrew’s argument is simply that, in the specific case of women in the workforce, the thumb of the government should be taken off the scale. Men should be allowed to have frat house workplaces as women are allowed to have longhouse workplaces. Men should be allowed to only hire other men, as women are allowed to hire all-female workplaces without concerns of successful diversity lawsuits. The Federal government shouldn’t prioritize woman-owned businesses in its contracting rules. Just let nature take its course, and the winners will win and the losers will lose. It may be that the losers are all the pro-men men on “my side.” But then at least we’d know and that would be quite interesting.

It seems like a very simple argument to me.

Men should be allowed to only hire other men, as women are allowed to hire all-female workplaces without concerns of successful diversity lawsuits.

I don't think that is the argument Andrews is making, because she sticks in some caveats about "I'm not saying women shouldn't work in these fields". She wants meritocracy, which means "if Susie is better than John, then hire Susie". She doesn't want "it doesn't matter if Susie is better than John, John went to the same school as Mike who is doing the hiring".

I do think it would be interesting to roll back society to 1930 or so, before women were in the workplace in the same numbers and the same professions. But I don't think that is what Andrews wants, and she does need to put a number on it rather than just vague handwaving about "too many girls".

she does need to put a number on it

Does she? Why? This seems like an isolated demand for pointless rigor.

vague handwaving about "too many girls".

Didn't she rather write along the lines of "too many of the wrong kinds of girls"?

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What is artificially high, though? If being majority female is wrong but majority male is right, how much admixture of female into a profession can you have before it tips over into "too much"? She claims that now women are flooding into professions and fields they are ruining those, but she also says that it's not a problem of having women in those fields as such. So we're back to "what proportion of journalism or medicine or law or education or working on an oil rig should be female?" and she doesn't answer that.

She's happy enough to be one of the women in the professions, which as I point out makes her part of the problem. Her answer seems to be "meritocracy! let men and women compete on equal terms!" Great, but what then if it still turns out more women than men make the grade?

I guess she would say, well, women are outcompeting men, so they should get the jobs. If it turns out that women would naturally comprise 90% of oil riggers, so be it. I don't know that she has secret beliefs that would override her publicly professed beliefs.

I don't see how she can say that. Her whole argument is that once the field is >50% female it changes to become worse. If that is not the case and a female majority profession works out just fine, then I don't even know what she is trying to say.

I think I agree with Hereandgone -- if meritocratic employment results in women dominating a field, quotas would have to be implemented to prevent this from wrecking the field. OR she is admitting that some female dominated communities can be truth seeking, competitive etc. and in that case it seems she just has a problem with certain specific corporate cultures rather than with their gender composition.

Or there are fields where women's natural strengths (empathy, nurturing, etc.) are more important than men's natural strengths (competitiveness, truth-seeking, etc.). I don't think anyone is going to mind if the majority of nurses or elementary school teachers turn out to be female.

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What is artificially high, though? If being majority female is wrong but majority male is right, how much admixture of female into a profession can you have before it tips over into "too much"?

It depends on the particular women and the resistance to those in the profession (both male and female) to switching over to the objectionable norms. It has long been noted in tech that the few women who were in the profession were often not happy at the change when normie women forced their norms upon the profession. Men in tech got beaten up rhetorically over the phrase and concept "fake geek girl", but it was a woman who popularized it, making just this point.

It seems to me any theory about rule of law or emotions regarding feminization/masculinization needs to contend with that men commit something like 80 to 90% of violent crime and the large majority of crime in general, and engage in many passionate irrational behaviors statistically more often.

Hearing a story about a woman involved in a shooting during a rage road incident, or a young girl shooting up a school, or gang activity are unicorn events. And it can't just be explained away as women being physically weaker, because guns are an incredible equalizer and if that was the only thing then we would see more women shooting at men as it's more needed for them to use violence (where as men can just use physical strength against women and don't need a gun). Instead, they opt out of it to begin with.Even across racial lines, black women commit less crime than any race of men.

Speaking of road rage from before which gender is more likely to drive dangerously because they're too impatient over a few seconds/few minutes of travel time? Not the women and American men (56%) drunk drive far more than women (29%) do and if you think that's self reporting bias, actual crime statistics for DUIs and studies into BAC levels would suggest men are might be even worse than that, possibly a 4:1 level.

Men are twice as likely to gamble, more likely to play the lottery, getting addicted to sports betting now, and in general make other similar unwise and irrational financial choices more than women do. Men are more likely to do drugs and drink lots of alcohol. While obesity rates are similar, general overweightness is, you guessed it, skewed quite a bit more towards men. Men are even more emotional about even stereotypical "woman" things like relationship breakups if the studies on this are accurate.

The buff muscle packed gang member prisoners are like the peak of many "masculinity" stereotypes, and they're all emotional imbeciles lacking so much thought that they found themselves in jail. And the more "male coded" a young boy is in much of black culture, the more likely they ain't getting far in life.

If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world? If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat? And if they're more dedicated to truth then how do you explain male dominated politics being so untruthful and so corrupt?

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Why though? This seems irrelevant to the point of the article which is how institutions function under the different gender styles. Men commit more crime, but if masculinized institutions actually severely punish that crime then it gets deterred and controlled. Under feminine institutions you get catch and release or things like the UK covering up rape gangs over racial concerns (not compartmentalizing and neurotically worrying about how justice effects perception of social groups). This seems clearly worse as men don't stop being masculine with feminized institutions, the rest of society that isn't low functioning is just even more impacted by this subset of males.

This entire comment is: dudes, rocking and the continuation thereof.

While obesity rates are similar, general overweightness is, you guessed it, skewed quite a bit more towards men.

Except "overweightness" was badly defined decades ago (and not fixed because of the growing inertia of Western society) such that the "overweight" range is the lowest all-cause mortality range (the elevated cardiovascular risk is more than compensated by reduced infection risk; in the "healthy" range your body is still skimping on the immune system to save calories). I'm in that range (BMI 27.2) as a result of a high-calorie diet, and before you accuse me of making excuses for base urges, I am literally anorexic and was dangerously underweight (I think my BMI was about 15) until I deliberately ate my way up into the "overweight" range on medical advice. I will brook no claims that this is the result of poor impulse control.

If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat?

It's men who contribute the vast majority of scientific advancement and creation of new things. The steam engine, the transistor, the telescope, the polio vaccine, antibiotics, nitrogen fertilizers... There'd be no cars to drunk drive, no statistics to collect, no jails, no guns to shoot and no slot machines without men, who made all those things in the first place.

And no men without women, for that matter. I reject this kind of 'war of the sexes' framing about who is better, both sexes are essential and have a distinct but complimentary role. It's not a good thing when men show up in female domains and start trying to change things up to suit their mindsets, the reverse is also true.

Criminals vastly outnumber inventive geniuses, and women were barred from equal access to education for centuries.

Women aren't banned from education today or for the last 50 years in Western countries. Yet there's been no huge surge of amazing female-founded companies as if we suddenly stopped squandering half the talent in the world. The female Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos does not exist, nor does she need to. Extremely stressful, high-risk or very high-performance roles are what men are supposed to handle, by and large. Likewise with dying for their country or getting maimed in industrial accidents.

It can't be 'all the good things about women are due to their innate superiority, all the bad things due to men being mean and oppressive'. Feminism isn't 'women keep all their old privileges and get new ones on top', that's not how it's worked out.

Women aren't banned from education today or for the last 50 years in Western countries.

50? Make that 70. Quite a bit more than that for some countries. Eg. the first engineering degree to a woman in Finland was awarded in 1905.

The University of Chicago was co-ed from its founding in 1890, as was Stanford a year later. Cornell was co-ed since it was founded in 1870. University of California Berkeley was not co-ed when founded, but went co-ed one year later in 1870. The first engineering degree awarded to a woman in the US was from UCB in 1876.

I rest my (and your) case.

Everything you're speaking of is explained by a single variable- agency. Men make their own decisions and follow through on them at much higher rates than women do. Often those decisions are quite bad; 'just being a normie' is a viable strategy for not being significantly below average. But on the other hand it also means far fewer women coming in significantly above average either- the distribution of very high achievement is very male skewed.

Even across racial lines, black women commit less crime than any race of men.

Very literally, this isn't true- black women are the one not-tautological subgroup of women who commit more crimes than any subgroup of men(IIRC asian men at least and some years also white men).

Women and men make different errors while driving. At some point after driving a lot you develop a knack for telling the sex of the driver when you witness some form of danger or stupidity on the road. Or while parking.

If it is reckless - it is usually a man. If it lacks situational awareness or control over the vehicle - chances are it is a woman.

Women and men make different errors while driving.

This used to be true, but nowadays where I live, women drive very aggressive as well, and make 'manly' mistakes a lot now.

For this reason women are also responsible for the vast majority of accidents. They're generally-worse drivers. Men just happen to be specifically worse in the one category which also generates the highest-value damage.

Citation?

The first numerical summary I could quickly find suggests that, while women get into approximately 13% more accidents per passenger-mile, men drive so many more passenger-miles that they get into approximately 45% more accidents per year. Their hyperlinks are broken, though (looks like someone just hit "copy link" to URLs whose results depend on session cookies) and they might have misinterpreted something.

The "highest-value damage" here, of course, is human life; nearly 3/4 of car accident deaths are males, despite females being more likely to die in any particular crash they're in. It's a value judgement as to what makes someone a "better" or "worse" driver, but for a US value-of-life metric it takes several hundred typical non-injury accidents to add up to one fatality.

[Edited to change "~" to "approximately" to fix a formatting bug]

It comes down to enforcecement. Are you willing to walk down the line and execute the violent political extremists one by one, or do you serve them hot chocolate when they wail about their 'lived experiences' that made them act out.

Compromise and serve them warm hemlock?

If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?

It’s like that line from True Detective, the world needs bad men to keep the other bad men away from the door.

If rule of law is so masculine, why do men keep breaking it while women follow the rules all around the world?

Because rule of law was specifically designed to deal with the problem of men's anti-social behavior.

If rationality is so masculine, why do men keep gambling away their money, driving drunk and get fat?

Higher male variance.

And if they're more dedicated to truth then how do you explain male dominated politics being so untruthful and so corrupt?

The goal of politics is not the pursuit of truth.

Because rule of law was specifically designed to deal with the problem of men's anti-social behavior.

Yeah I'd agree. Women in general tend to be peaceful (as we can see by crime rates around the world) and even commit non violent crimes less often. The rule of law came about specifically as a way to address irrational and emotional men who get into fights with each other, steal, drunk drive, or do other insane behavior. Even in terrorist zones like the middle east, women are basically considered at the level of young children for likelyhood being non combatants. We basically never have to worry about a female extremist, despite them still being half the population. It's up to 90:10 ratio.

  • -10

In its majestic equality the law punishes both men and women equally for bad behaviors overwhelmingly preferred by men (which also happen to be the simplest to prove).

The fact that there's no formal check against women's anti-social behavior is kind of the central issue here. Humanity hasn't evolved a way to do that yet, and it's been 150 years since the old ways of doing that were workable (though camouflaged by the fact the 1910s are out of living memory and the massive post-WW2 economic boom covering up the problem for the generation currently in power).

Cool, so now that your question is answered without contradicting anything of the theory you criticized, it seems like it holds up pretty well.

I've seen versions of this argument before, and there is one point that I always get caught up on, voiced here as

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.

...which sounds plausible, but then I remember that this has a great deal of overlap with complaints I have read in many forms from Westerners finding themselves in a Japanese workplace. Japan is not exactly known as a den of feminism, so could the author be wrongfully universalising a Western perspective? (The hypothetical tail of the argument is also: if Japan is in fact feminised, which I guess would mesh well with old "effeminate Asians" stereotypes, then why does it work so well in ways that the Aesthetic Right tends to appreciate in particular? Why does it not import refugees or create HR departments, and why is it happy to glass-ceiling women at lower management level and outright push them to get married and retire in their 30s once you look at more traditional corporations?)

FWIW in Japanese there is a suffix, -ne which basically means, 'isn't it so?', 'right?', this agreement seeking suffix is associated with feminine speech.

Everyone can use that suffix, and it is not exclusively agreement-seeking (a simple そうだね。 has all the vibes of an English "Right."~"I see.", and the Facebook "like" button is translated as いいね).

Correct but it’s not really feminine, men use it all the time. Maybe women use it a bit more.

The -wa suffix, which is feminine, seems to be becoming more common amongst young men at least in fiction. I think this is just because young men watch a lot of anime babes and then subconsciously repeat what they hear.

わisn't feminine in Kansai, though tone and various other things will affect this (as they will with ね.)

I have been never to Japan, but I thought their thing was more about deference to seniority and authority, rather than true consensus.

Where's @George_E_Hale when you need him?

The eternal question. I think there's a lot going on here, and a bit of simplification of a grand clockwork that isn't simple. Unfortunately I am in transit with no time to bless everyone with my important thoughts.

See this paper (randomly lifted from Google) and everything that it cites. I haven't personally experienced the Japanese workplace, but I have worked with and socialised with many Japanese people (and do not have a language barrier), and the core thesis essentially rings true. The role of the senior is fundamentally ceremonial, and any significant decisions affecting the group are always based on meticulous vibe-checking. A senior or authority who fails to vibe-check and just steamrolls their personal preference will find themselves sidelined in the most Mean Girls way imaginable, unless it's literally a doddering old (wo)man with a long social track record in which case they will be superficially humoured while the actual decisions are carefully made behind their back.

I have been never to Japan, but I thought their thing was more about deference to seniority and authority, rather than true consensus.

So is the mean girl style. Well, less seniority, and the authority is even less legible, but it's definitely not true consensus.

I wonder how much of this is just age. Old people don't like to buck the trend, strike out on their own, take risks. And notably, western societies have been getting older while japan has been older.

With Japan, it’s essentially an American/South-American problem where tact is perceived as dishonesty or time-wasting. The Japanese are no more effeminate than the Victorian British.

It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.

Ideally the former is clearly understood but not rubbed in, so as to spare the recipient’s blushes; the latter can easily become an exercise in allowing the critic to emotionally detach from the situation.

I’m not saying that Japan is all one way or that women are all the other way, but there’s the shadow of an important distinction to be made IMO.

I've spent years working at several different Japanese companies, and this is a pretty spot-on analysis.

It’s hard to describe exactly, but there’s a difference between presenting criticism in a way that allows people to save face, and the kind of knives-covered-in-sugar behaviour where the critic tries to pretend that no criticism is actually occurring.

Which setting, do you figure, does which?

A missing piece of the puzzle may be that (as far as I can tell) well-adjusted women in "feminised" social groups in the West also in fact do get the substance of socially-diffused deniable criticism clearly, even when it is never explicitly stated to them. Failures occur when men and incorrectly socialised (or neurodivergent) women enter those circles.

I've even seen a pattern along the lines of the following: Chinese girl to American CS student guy friend: "I feel like those people hate me and don't actually want me to join their homework group" - guy friend: "Did they actually say something to the effect? No? I'm sure they are just busy, don't worry about it too much" - [girl gets bullied out of the girls' group and winds up with only male friends, who also all want to get with her]. In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her. The system worked fine, up until the point that it had to contend with people that expected it to be something that it actually isn't.

In this case, the girl should have followed her initial instincts; in fact probing about it more positively would have revealed that she had a pretty accurately understanding of why the others were cross with her.

Now I'm curious. Why were the others cross with her?

In that particular case, I never found out. It was an undergrad that I only intersected with as we both TAed the same course, and my curiosity about undergrad drama was no longer high enough to seek out information that was not volunteered.

On another occasion, there was a mixed undergrad/grad bouldering group I was in for a while, and one of the undergrad girls (who seemed to be socially fairly central to the group before) suddenly stopped coming. I asked why I hadn't seen her around and the only response I got was "X? Oh, X is cancelled." Some of the other undergrads present just turned around and did some sort of "oh yeah, there was that" raised-eyebrows nod. - me: "Huh? What happened?" - interlocutor, repeating: "She's cancelled." I didn't pry further. Figures what they have going on.

Most of her female friends would tell her the same thing, only because it breaks omerta to explain what's going on rather than out of genuine misunderstanding.

But she understood that intuitively, which is why she didn't ask her female friends. If she did ask, the reply, however superficially encouraging, probably would have carried an undertone of "really? you are asking about that?" that she would also have caught on to. The point is that female (and oldschool Japanese) norms are not actually reducible to "Male Westerner culture, with a layer of obscuring passive-aggressive misdirection applied on top"; communication really is supposed to bottom out in getting a hint, and making sure that others get the hints that you want to drop, with no truthful explanation in words being accessible as a last resort, and yet it works if everyone cooperates on it. (Whether it is a global or merely a local optimum is another question.)

If she understood that, she already knew what was going on and was asking her male friend in order to get precisely the wrong answer she wanted. But, yes, mean girl communication norms do work. They're just even more viciously status-dependent than male communication norms.

A companion piece to this by the indomitable Louise Perry, Cancel Culture is Girl Culture.

WARNING: You hit a paywall just as this article is starting to get interesting.

Louise Perry, Cancel Culture is Girl Culture

I think you mean this, the link just redirects back to my post... https://www.louiseperry.co.uk/p/cancel-culture-is-girl-culture

Thanks, edited my link.

The overarching theory is very poor here. Andrews is writing as one of the few women in a field that has always been and continues to be extremely male (American right wing political opinion), and has no real experience of working in a female dominated environment.

empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others, and that arguably challenges other conclusions she makes too. Andrews hints at this but then dismisses it in a very unsatisfactory way (she mentions ‘underhanded’ female competition but then says again later than women aren’t competitive). The implication is that a few women (like her) are fine but majority women (she has never worked in such an organization) are not. In fact, historically there have been many times in which women were more conservative than men. Women were and remain in many parts of the world the enforcers of traditional sexual morality (ie ‘slut shaming’) in the traditional institutions that they manage.

Nevertheless, their urging and clamouring is real and does have an effect, the UN Human Rights Commission helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa.

What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.

What really drove academia to be woke from the early 2010s is the interaction between both wider cultural developments like mass immigration and specific sector dynamics, like large numbers of foreign faculty at American universities (the global holy grail for academics because pay is 2-3x what it is anywhere else), extreme competition for tenure due to ridiculous levels of PhD overproduction, the need to narrow that competition, the fact that academia had been broadly very left for many decades (depending on faculty for centuries) and extremely so since the 1960s, making structures very weak to faculty racial activism. Once you decide you must hire many more black faculty, you soon find, for example, that 67% of black people awarded PhDs in America are women, so naturally you will hire mostly women.

This is all obvious stuff that Andrews was too lazy or otherwise unwilling to google, clearly.

for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them

Changing it from "risk" to "personal risk" may be more accurate. I'm pretty sure that the people who are most involved in promoting such policies are the least personally affected by them. The risk to themselves is low.

Women are viciously competitive (as most women who went to high school will tell you) and don’t particularly empathize with their enemies. The safety point is correct in the abstract (men are much more willing to take risks) but arbitrary and poorly considered, for example one can easily construe mass immigration, soft-on-crime and other progressive policies as inherently riskier and ‘less safe’ than just not doing them. You can say that empathy overrides safetyism, but then it appears to sometimes and not at others

Which is why you'd say it's more likely higher agreeableness than higher empathy.

Conformity to an inconsistently sympathetic or safetyist ideology would explain this.

Women are viciously competitive

There are multiple kinds of competition. Are women known for violently beating or killing eachother for a stranger looking at them the wrong way? No, that's a male thing. Women do not compete like men compete. What kind of man does this:

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.”

What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.

And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended? No, of course not, people believed this stuff. It was the Cold Warriors like Nixon and Reagan who were amongst the more positively inclined US presidents towards South Africa, not the reverse. South Africa was actually on their side in the Cold War, possessed useful naval bases, fought communist-backed states.

Most importantly, Andrews has this statistic:

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.

What is that if not indicating wokeness? Maybe it's not 'conservative' or 'liberal' since that depends on context. In the imagined Trumpenreich, it would be very left-wing to fight for free speech and Stand Up against His Lies about a cohesive, all-white society. But in the modern day, in the real world, we know the polarity of 'free speech' vs 'cohesive society'. I fail to see how calling for the undermining of free speech in the America of today to protect a cohesive society could be interpreted in any other way than as woke.

And if women are woker, then having more women in places of prominence where they can implement this mindset can only make everything woker. If those two lines of argument hold, then everything else falls into place.

And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended?

Apartheid ended before the Soviet Union fell.

Good point, for some reason I thought it was like '92 or something... Nevertheless foreign aid and support for black South Africa continued and still continues today. It's not exactly the height of Cold War realpolitik to support putting the Soviet-trained, Soviet-funded guerrillas into power.

?? Apartheid ending was a relatively long process lasting into the early 90s. The Berlin Wall came down in '89.

I don’t know, I think she’s got a point, especially here:

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 tug at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.

The women in my life (not loads admittedly but some) are broadly:

  • More inclined to be agreeable, and to practice a form of ‘conscious centrism’ by carefully triangulating between the people in the room to decide what they believe.
  • Much less inclined to bite bullets, that is to accept ‘cold equations’ logic when it hurts sympathetic people.
  • Generally more inclined to be guided by empathy for the right people. I know a family lawyer who will take sympathetic women pro bono for example.

The points you are making are true as well. There is vicious intra-group competition, empathy can be very limited, etc. I don’t think those points are in opposition to these conclusions.

Hanania has a response in which he argues that, while female-dominated institutions may not be sufficiently devoted to truth and consistency, neither are male-dominated ones.

The difference is the concept of "fair play". Men naturally set up games with rules to structure conflict as an alternative to lethal violence. We even see this in males of other distantly related species where fights have a particular formal pattern. There are rules about how to challenge another male, how that challenge is accepted or conceded, and then they may even take turns attempting to intimidate or hurt their opponent. Usually this is all done in public, possibly with an audience. This all occurs in animals following mere instinct, and human males share these instincts. The institutions that allow us to scale up societies beyond their Dunbar number are basically dependent on this undercurrent of "fair play", and women don't really have those same instincts, or at least not as strongly or as often. Female competition is focused on protecting infants, subterfuge, and persuading others to do violence on their behalf. They don't abide by any rules of fair play, and it doesn't come naturally to them. Any institution that depends on fair play norms will not survive being staffed by mostly women unless those women are a highly selected group, but there aren't enough of those women to staff many institutions.

This is not to say that most men are necessarily good or consistent about this either. Most people aren't up to doing most important things, but we just need enough people, not most.

He's onto something there. Trust-seeking, the "nerd masculine" archetype as described in Hanania's comments, is not actually masculine. It has nothing to do specifically with reproductive strategies for the sex with cheaper gametes. Truth-seeking is genderless, and as the sex with greater variability men have more pressure to exhibit genderless behaviour.

If you evopsychmaxx it could be seen as the nerd genes, not cutting it in a purely caveman-masculine world, finding another way. Instead of being directly appealing, change the world and shape society, so that those like you are more likely to thrive later.

Ironically the one civil institution that is becoming less 'female' is The church.

It does make sense, in that any churches that take doctrine seriously are going to have certain advice like "wives submit to your husband" and "be modest and demure" and "it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church" (1 Corinthians 14:34-35).

And so the Church is like the one place where "minimal restraint on females' decision-making" is NOT a core ideal baked into every other rule they follow. And where the idea that men and women are different (and that's just fine) is part of the very founding text from Book 1. "Male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27). Its like page 2 of the freakin' book.

Related note, it seems like women are less comfortable using AI in general, and particularly in the business context.

THAT is going to have massive downstream effects if AIs do become half as ubiquitous as the boosters (and the investment levels) suggest. Not only are female-dominated jobs probably more prone to AI takeover, they're less likely to use the AI to augment their performance in the meantime.

And then, other recent studies find that women find leadership roles in business emotionally depleting, anxiety-inducing. Even when painted over with the language of "gender norms," the raw conclusion of the study is that women in leadership don't handle pressure well on a personal level.

Deviating from gender norms made the women feel incompetent or anxious, they reported.

As a result, the women who engaged in more assertive behaviors often felt depleted, overwhelmed by their workload and more withdrawn as a whole.

Interestingly, men in the study did not experience any stress over these gender expectations.

Basically, if you take the gender studies approach seriously, then you have to suggest that we upend the entirety of society's notion of gender roles in order to make some small subset of women who become business leaders more comfortable with their jobs, rather than suggesting that these women could find positions that don't actively degrade their mental health, as an easy solution.

Huge contortions to avoid the conclusion that males tend to have psychological traits better suited for leadership roles, in line with the entirety of human history.

I kind of hate that the bulk of research is showing that the presence of women in the professional workspace immediately makes the environment feel more hostile for men, in the sense that they now have to navigate the minefield of HR rules and avoid offending the most easily offended demographics on earth... meanwhile these women are becoming emotionally unglued with the expectations and the deadlines and the constant stress of comparing themselves to other high performers while also navigating the social dynamics they themselves impose on any group context. Basically we've given ourselves the worst of all possible worlds where neither gender is allowed to have anything close to their ideal working conditions.

I daresay this is a worse equilibrium for everyone involved than one where women were effectively banned from working in the same departments as men.

I further, and more daringly, say that the only fix is re-asserting masculine norms and refusing to coddle feminine feelings simply to keep women on staff.

Simply, I don't see any feasible way to make the business environment, with its heavy competition, hard decisions, constant demands on your time and your sanity more comfortable for the fairer sex without destroying the actual mechanisms which make it function at all. No more bonuses for good performance, no more unpaid overtime, no more crunch, no more strict hierarchy and constantly shifting expectations and demands... how can commerce occur in such conditions?

If you want to escape all that, well, can I suggest starting a family?

So in short, I would agree with and Amplify Ms. Andrews up there.

Related note, it seems like women are less comfortable using AI in general,

Half of all ERP use is women, at least. Seems they're quite comfortable with that.

How many would happily admit to that if pressed, though.

Yeah, self reports are worthless. Look at what people do, not what they say.

Consider this screencap of the trending tab (the number is chat msgs in last 24h) on one of the less degenerate chatbot sites.

It does blow my mind that women seem to be able to get 90% of their sexual gratification from text alone, with some visual accompaniment.

Proof is in the pudding, but my male brain pretty much demands that I get some sort of visual and audio stimulation and ideally it be physically present, so its hard for me to grok how it feels to get aroused from text without some accompanying expectation of actual physical contact later.

Can you not... visualize the action in your head?

As a man, my problem with female erotica is that the content sucks, not that the medium does.

I can visualize, but I guess my point is that if its a sexting session, I'm visualizing the other person and anticipating a future experience and its the anticipated experience that I'm really fixating on.

I don't think the mere words are technically what I'm responding to.

Like, I have made some attempts to do erotic roleplay with LLMs, and they get the idea but its hard to feel like the tease is 'real' without the promise of some fulfillment later.

So... it doesn't work for me. I can visualize the acts, but with an AI there's zero chance of it going anywhere. Its words on a screen, and they don't promise a payoff.

Its also what makes Onlyfans a little perplexing to me. Its all the emotional distance of a stripper, none of the skin-on-skin contact.

This also makes the digitally-intermediated dating environment a bit of a hellscape for me by default.

Going by the level of literacy and apparent age of people who write these chat cards, a median user of LLM ERP has probably never had actual sex and if he or she were honest with themselves, would admit that it's over because all they know is the digitally-intermediated dating environment hellscape.

It kind of blows my mind that people can't get it from text alone. Then again, since I grew up relatively pornless, maybe it's just an adaptation, or I'm so used to holding myself back in key ways [i.e. the reasons for that state] that I've accidentally become transgender just kind of stopped trying to prefer the strictly visual.

Perhaps I'm just more comfortable externalizing the whole thing, which as I understand it is also not exactly stereotypically male. Or maybe it's just because you can't masturbate cuddling, I dunno.

I think that there are tricks to make porn that's strictly visible gratifying in the text way where you... basically just show the emotional effects (or rather, fail to neglect them), but to do that requires some intentionality and most of it is just trying to show off the largest examples of certain anatomy possible. (Text can do that too, but if it does this poorly, things throb harder than humanity's collective mass of stubbed toes.)

It kind of blows my mind that people can't get it from text alone.

Same, although TBF I'm old enough that my teenage years largely predate the world wide web, so there's definitely a generational component to that for me. The dirty stories and smutty books had all kinds of good stuff that could push a lot more of my developing buttons than the stock "three flavors of provocatively posed naked young ladies" that made up the majority of pornography back when Shelbyville was called Morganville and you couldn't get a white onion because of the war and all you could get was those big yellow ones.

"Throbbing," "dripping" and "devouring" are, to me, inherently un-sexy words, yet literotica seems to consider those the best damn words in the whole thesaurus.

And here I was, thinking we had phased out "devouring" with the more succinct "voring".

Honestly, half the problem with trying to use sexy words in this type of literature is that they just come off as... kind of ham-fisted. If I have to read "wow, you're inside me" and "I'm cumming" one more fucking time I'm going to moan extremely loudly scream.

the presence of women in the professional workspace immediately makes the environment feel more hostile for men, in the sense that they now have to navigate the minefield of HR rules and avoid offending the most easily offended demographics on earth

Okay, I may be a minority here, but I can tell you that this is not reaction to women in the workplace at all.

If I am in a conversation with some other guys at work and a female colleague enters the room, I that does not make me feel hostility. No, "oh, now I have to watch my mouth, no more sexual innuendo, no more discussion of how fuckable common acquaintances are, no more innocent showing of nudes of my sex partners."

Because I do not engage in this kind of talk even when I am in an all-male setting. Not even when I hang out with my friends, actually. Now, perhaps I simply give off vibes which tell other men that I do not want to discuss tits with them during work hours, and every other man is suffering in silence every time I or a woman enter the room, but I think that is unlikely.

Regarding HR minefields, at least here in Europe the minefield seems easily navigable even for a spectrum-dweller like myself. Don't ask women for sexual favors at work, avoid touching your colleagues without their consent, don't send unsolicited dick pics.

Now I am sure that there are some women who would be offended by my workplace behavior ("he called that connector 'female' instead of 'socket-type', and he has not renamed his dev branch from master to main yet"), but thankfully, I have not encountered any at work yet.

If I am in a conversation with some other guys at work and a female colleague enters the room, I that does not make me feel hostility.

Never said it did. Its not the occasional encounter with a female in the workspace that is the real issue. Its the tipping point when you are basically unable to avoid interacting with the female colleagues daily and the norms around 'professionalism' change with this reality.

If the work environment, the boundaries of 'professional' conduct are pretty much defined what the most easily offended coworker will tolerate. And the company will usually craft all of its personnel policies around mitigating the risk of offending said coworker.

What it actually means in practice is that you have to be careful about leveling critiques at female coworkers or suggesting they aren't performing adequately or even making jokes at their expense, since at any given time they can take offense to it and claim, e.g. 'discrimination' based on their gender, or hostile work environment, or claim your workplace has a general 'bro' culture.

And, of course, if you do end up finding one of your single female colleagues attractive, your options are:

A) Either stifle that feeling as hard as possible and hope that you can stay in contact if one or both of you leave the company; or

B) Put it all on the line to actually ask her out, which in the best case she reciprocates (although let's not talk about what happens if that situation sours) and in the worst she rejects and then interprets almost everything you do later as vindictive retaliation for the rejection until it becomes an HR complaint regardless of how you conduct yourself afterwards.

And the complications if you have a higher position than she does.

And being as polite as possible, do you spend much time in male-dominated group settings at all? Outside of work?

One of the key social dynamics for men (not universally, but almost) is 'line treading' by bringing up ever-more-controversial topics or making ever-more-edgy jokes until someone finally calls them out and says "whoah dude, too far." Then he apologizes, walks it back, and everyone going forward forgives them as long as they don't habitually step over that line in the future.

And the very instant an unvetted female enters the group, that line gets WAY more constrained, and the possible consequences for crossing it get way sharper. The men are no longer 'comfortable' pushing that boundary and it puts a strain on camaraderie.

"oh, now I have to watch my mouth, no more sexual innuendo, no more discussion of how fuckable common acquaintances are, no more innocent showing of nudes of my sex partners."

This is the thin edge of the wedge. The harmful stuff is where male normal aggressive communication is dispensed with because women don't really reciprocate it as well as men and this gradually escalates until you can't call ideas bad directly in meetings and need to catch up with the person pushing forward the bad idea in a one on one ect ect.

Don't ask women for sexual favors at work, avoid touching your colleagues without their consent, don't send unsolicited dick pics.

A guy got fired after being overheard joking about his big dongle at a conference.

Okay, I may be a minority here, but I can tell you that this is not reaction to women in the workplace at all.

And I can tell you it is, because the people making those rules outright said it is.

And not just the stuff you're referring to, that's just the motte. Also anything vaguely adjacent; the banning of Lena as a test image. Or objecting to certain memes ("Hide your kids, hide your wife"). And things not adjacent at all; objecting to talk of videogames and Star Trek. And also objecting to and banning communication styles common among men in the industry .

I am not saying that "predominantly female SJ employees take over a company, establish a woke regime of terror where lunch conversations about video games are banned" never happens.

But I do not think that this is the inevitable consequence of letting women enter the workforce.

Generally, I think that there is some optimal fraction of costs dedicated to workplace culture. In the zeroth approximation, that fraction is zero, because employees should just get their job done. But in higher orders, one would consider that the productivity of employees is a function of workspace culture, so there are gains to be had by investing in workplace culture (e.g. have a HR department to intervene on alleged assaults, make sure that employees are willing to talk to each other, etc).

Naturally, the gains of having a great workplace culture are finite: you can't solve P=NP by taking a few grad students and placing them in an extremely motivating environment.

Another consideration might be if things get more extreme in bullshit jobs than in non-bullshit jobs. After all, if the main purpose of your job is to be another person of the payroll of your department so that your head of department can maintain their political power against other departments, nobody will care much if you waste time playing stupid status games. If your job is actually contributing to the bottom line, then finding grievances to whine about will not improve your KPIs. Obviously one limit to that is anti-discrimination law which the company might run afoul of.

Still, managers who genuinely takes the concern of their employee about others talking about video games during lunch seriously, rather than mentally earmarking her as "going out of her way to find things to be offended by, downsize at earliest opportunity" are already not aligned to the corporate bottom line.

Generally, I think that there is some optimal fraction of costs dedicated to workplace culture. In the zeroth approximation, that fraction is zero, because employees should just get their job done. But in higher orders, one would consider that the productivity of employees is a function of workspace culture, so there are gains to be had by investing in workplace culture (e.g. have a HR department to intervene on alleged assaults, make sure that employees are willing to talk to each other, etc).

This is avoiding the question of what a good workplace culture is. Is it one where guys can wear T-shirts with Star Trek characters on them and talk about videogames, or is it one where this is disallowed because it makes women uncomfortable? Is it one where guys can get into a heated discussion on some technical manner, arguing and interrupting each other, or is it one where this is disallowed because women find it difficult to participate in such a free-for-all? Is it one where someone who says something ignorant or stupid can be called out, or one where their ignorance or stupidity is treated with kindness? Is it one where guys must constantly examining their language for "sexist" expressions (like the default male pronoun, or popular memes which reference rape) and making sure no technical matters are incidentally sexist (e.g. talking about male and female connectors, or a gender bender, or using a test image of an attractive woman)?

Because we've seen for decades -- and turned up to 11 in the last 15 years -- that this is what you get. It follows directly from having women in the workplace and specially protected from offense or anything that could be considered to make them uncomfortable.

I was previously directed towards this article. I think it touches on a lot of correct issues, particularly the ability to file lawsuits for a place being too masculine, but not too feminine. However, I think as an overarching theory it seems to me to be at best half baked. I don't know why I feel that way, but I did when I first read it and still do on review.


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