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Notes -
Helen Andrews and the Great Feminization
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/
Some excerpts:
And we wonder why men are dropping out of the workforce/university...
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:
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):
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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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.
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Oh to be 14 again, when I didn't know the difference between the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate.
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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?
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.
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She thinks they're highly-correlated in practice, in traditionally-male fields.
No, because part of 'merit' here is 'not acting in typically-feminine ways which ruin the workplace.'
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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?)
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.
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My understanding is that there are two main thrusts:
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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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".
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Only Nixon could go to China.
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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.
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!
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!
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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.
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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.
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I'm emoji-prone myself but think this is probably a correct standard for this site. 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.
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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.
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?
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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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.'
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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.
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.
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".
Does she? Why? This seems like an isolated demand for pointless rigor.
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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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.
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