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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.
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"?
Did she? Because I didn't get that fine distinction; women en masse have the feminine qualities of x, y and z; a majority female workplace and majority female society will be disadvantaged because of the lack of masculine qualities a, b and c; the solution is more men and more male-values and male-oriented workplaces.
Nothing about "but the right kind of women are this kind". It was "too many women" simpliciter was the problem. I think this must be the part of her piece you have in mind:
So her idea there is that by applying "fair rules", the trend will naturally reverse to having more men than women. She doesn't develop the argument about "what sort of women?", presumably she means "judging on male metrics rather than female ones, the best candidates regardless of sex will come to the top".
That does presuppose that some of those best candidates will be women, and that those women will fit in to a "masculine office culture" (so, no more getting offended by "grab 'em by the pussy", then?)
But even the "One of the Guys" gals are at risk, see comments higher up about intelligent women are being wasted by going into the workplace instead of having babies which they breastfeed at home and do the whole skin-to-skin contact thing (very much less frequent in reality than presumed by such comments) because stressed moms are bad for the babies. Take even Helen Andrews out of the workforce so she can prop up the cratering TFR and have smart kids with her (presumably) smart husband, which she raises herself in the perfect domestic environment!
I don't think Andrews wants that, despite her comments about being the mother of sons, but that's where the logic leads if we extend it out: not just too many women in the workplace, there should be no women at all! For the sake of TFR and raising non-neurodivergent kids!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the argument #1 for unregulated meritocracy being better for institutional health and productivity, as made by Andrews, and the argument #2 for women in general but especially intelligent women to stay at home and focus on their biological role, as made by some commentors here, are separate, and it takes conflating them to reach the conclusion that Andrews is requesting that intelligent women focus on breeding the next generation. I think Andrews is only making argument #1, not #2.
And, full disclosure, I think both arguments are valid.
Also, what do you mean by
At risk of what?
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