Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

In a recent popular essay, American cultural critic Helen Andrews warned that the feminisation of workplaces, academia and law presents an existential threat to civilisation. Is she correct? And if so, what is the solution?

Just occasionally, an idea with great explanatory power for the world we inhabit is articulated with singular clarity.

“The Great Feminisation” — an essay published earlier this month by American cultural critic Helen Andrews — does exactly that.

In just over 3,400 words, Andrews observes an elephant whose presence has long lingered in the proverbial room, but that most Westerners — men especially — have been reluctant to call out.

“Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organisation or field.”

“That is the Great Feminisation thesis,” Andrews writes. “Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminisation.”

It goes without saying that, as a woman herself, Andrews is not diminishing the worth or value of women. Instead, she is challenging the modern notion that men and women have identical, inseparable and interchangeable strengths. Her aim is to expose how this false belief has hurt society — including women — and how we might make it right.

According to Andrews:

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behaviour applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?

The numbers don’t lie, Andrews contends:

Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.

“The substance fits, too,” she adds. “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritising the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

As an example, Andrews cites one survey which “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”.

For those who bristle at Andrews’ argument, she has elsewhere offered the following, rather compelling defence:

Feminisation is a great example of what Michael Anton calls the Celebration Parallax, which is a fancy term for anything where you’re only allowed to notice something if you think it’s a good thing.

There are literally thousands of articles out there saying it’s great that we have more women judges now because women are more empathetic, or it’s good to have more women on corporate boards because that’ll make capitalism more humane.

It is only when you say women are fundamentally changing the bedrock institutions of our society and that might be bad that you start to get into trouble.

The Dangers of the Great Feminisation

In her recent speech on the same topic, Helen Andrews warned about the dangers of the Great Feminisation:

Feminisation, in the case of many important institutions, is a bad thing. In a few cases, it is so bad as to threaten the end of civilisation. The rule of law, for example, is a very important thing. It’s also very fragile. It requires a deep commitment to objectivity and clear rules, even when those rules yield an outcome that is not nice. I do not want judges who are more interested in context and relationships than in what the law says.

Academia is the one part of our society that’s supposed to be about finding and transmitting the truth. If it instead becomes about censoring ideas that are dangerous or threatening, then it no longer serves its purpose.

In business, if the only way to advance at your company is to behave in the most HR-compliant way possible, that’s going to exclude and discourage the very people who are most likely to be leaders and innovators.

I happen to think that the most important political issue in America today right now is immigration, and that is a perfect example of a political issue where the elite consensus is highly feminised. We have all of these laws on the books about citizenship and borders, but we’re not allowed to enforce any of them if it might make somebody sad.

So, rule of law, pursuit of truth, borders, innovation — without these things, I am not being hyperbolic when I say that a thoroughly feminised civilisation will set itself on the road to collapse.

Three Compelling Insights from Helen Andrews

Before I offer three measured correctives to Helen Andrews’ thesis, let me highlight three of her most compelling insights.

First, there are innate and immutable differences between men and women. Writes Andrews:

Female group dynamics favour 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,” she concludes. “In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracise their enemies.”

These differences are not due to socialisation, Andrews argues, but a fundamental difference in how men and women are wired biologically. She references a book by psychology professor Joyce Benenson, titled Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes, that seeks to account for this wiring:

Men developed group dynamics optimised for war, while women developed group dynamics optimised for protecting their offspring. These habits, formed in the mists of prehistory, explain why experimenters in a modern psychology lab, in a study that Benenson cites, observed that a group of men given a task will “jockey for talking time, disagree loudly,” and then “cheerfully relay a solution to the experimenter.” A group of women given the same task will “politely inquire about one another’s personal backgrounds and relationships … accompanied by much eye contact, smiling, and turn-taking,” and pay “little attention to the task that the experimenter presented.”

These innate differences between the sexes do not simply yield different modes of interaction, Andrews explains. Rather, they’re aimed at achieving fundamentally different outcomes:

The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday. Females, even in primate species, are slower to reconcile than males. That is because women’s conflicts were traditionally within the tribe over scarce resources, to be resolved not by open conflict but by covert competition with rivals, with no clear terminus.

Second, perhaps the greatest single weakness of wokeness — and of feminisation — is an inability or refusal to compartmentalise.

“Men tend to be better at compartmentalising than women,” Andrews writes, “and wokeness was in many ways a society-wide failure to compartmentalise.” She illustrates her point with easily recognisable examples from the last half-decade:

Traditionally, an individual doctor might have opinions on the political issues of the day but he would regard it as his professional duty to keep those opinions out of the examination room. Now that medicine has become more feminised, doctors wear pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza. They even bring the credibility of their profession to bear on political fads, as when doctors said Black Lives Matter protests could continue in violation of Covid lockdowns because racism was a “public health emergency”.

Third, Andrews singles out the legal system as the chief casualty of feminisation.

“The field that frightens me most is the law,” she writes. “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.”

Why?

“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.”

Andrews offers a chilling prediction of where a feminised legal system could take the West — namely, the Title IX tribunals for campus sexual assault created in 2011 during the Obama administration. She recalls:

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 sympathised with the accusers, who were mostly women, and not with the accused, who were mostly men.

Andrews also cites the Brett Kavanaugh hearings as an example of what a feminised legal system will produce:

The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence that she and Kavanaugh were ever in the same room together, her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.

Three Measured Correctives for Helen Andrews

Now, let’s consider three measured correctives for Helen Andrews’ thesis.

First, Andrews is insistent that the feminisation she is describing is demographic, not merely cultural — but I have reservations.

Yes, institutions are feminised when they are populated by more women than men. But they can also be feminised long before that tipping point is reached, thanks to strong cultural forces.

An obvious example is the evangelical church, which still enjoys predominantly male leadership but has long been criticised for embracing a culture shaped by feminine norms and priorities.

The corporate world is another example cited by Andrews: though still male-dominated, it has already embraced DEI and ESG frameworks extensively.

In short, Western culture itself has become highly feminised, creating an environment where an institution can embody feminine norms long before enjoying a female majority.

Second, Andrews’ assertion that “wokeness is not… an outgrowth of Marxism” is historically myopic.

Critical Theory, which emerged from the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s, is deeply influenced by Marxist thought. While Marx focused primarily on class struggle and economic exploitation, Critical Theory extended his ideas to culture, ideology, and social institutions more broadly.

Wokeness, in turn, is the practical application of Critical Theory to everyday life. Wokeness took Critical Theory’s academic critique of power and turned it into a culture of moral policing, where speech and behaviour are tightly regulated and group identity rules supreme.

Thus, wokeness most certainly is an outgrowth of Marxism.

But it’s not only an outgrowth of Marxism. Andrews’ mistake is to attribute wokeness to just one cause — feminisation — when it is a river formed by many streams.

Third, Andrews attributes the differences between men and women to evolutionary causes, yet the enduring order and complementarity of the sexes bears the unmistakeable mark of the Creator.

To claim that these phenomena were “formed in the mists of prehistory”, as Andrews does, is little more than dressing storytelling up as science.

Much like Rudyard Kipling’s whimsical Just‑So Stories, such explanations offer imaginative stories of how traits could have arisen without providing any evidence of how they actually did.

Men and women are different, yes — but not due to happenstance or random chance processes. We are different, and gloriously so, because God made us that way.

He designed men to lead, protect, and act decisively, equipping them to confront challenges head-on, settle disputes, and restore order after conflict. He made women to nurture, sympathise, and sustain life, endowing them with a unique ability to build consensus, guide outcomes with gentle authority, and sustain warmth and cohesion in families and communities.

These differences are not arbitrary. They are complementary by God’s design, woven into our very nature, and expressed in the ways men and women interact, make decisions, and shape the world around them. Most importantly, they are good gifts from God, given so that we might flourish and faithfully fulfil our various callings in society.

The Solution to the Great Feminisation

So, what is Andrews’ solution to the problem she names?

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

In short, she’s not calling for women to be restricted or discouraged from pursuing a chosen career. Instead, the institutional levers designed to favour women need to end — like anti-discrimination laws that punish companies for having too few women, HR rules that police office interactions and enforce a conflict‑free “nice” culture, and quotas that reward women over men or favour traditionally feminine behaviour.

She also highlights the two-income trap, which often pushes women into certain career paths. If families had more choice, she argues, this would help naturally mitigate the distortions caused by the Great Feminisation.

Read The Great Feminisation here. Watch Helen Andrews’ speech here.

___

Image courtesy of Adobe.