The Great Feminization, Wokeness, and the Rule of Law

“Everything you think about as Wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.”  That was the major thesis of an eye-opening seventeen minute talk by Helen Andrews at a National Conservative conference in September last year. 

“The Great Feminization” is one of the seven most impactful revolutions that economist Tyler Cowan listed as occurring within his lifetime, a revolution whose importance becomes more visible every day.  While the pop-culture and media linger on the absurd topic of patriarchy, females have taken or will soon take majority roles in numerous critical professions.

Females already constitute majorities in law and medical schools as well as college faculties.  Accordingly, they now receive the majority of B.A.s and Ph.D.s.  And in the formerly male-dominated field of psychology, eighty percent of new entrants are female.  Females also constitute the majority of law firm associates as well as persons in white collar jobs that require a college degree.  Four of the nine Supreme Court justices are now female as is nearly thirty percent of Congress.  Females are also prominent in positions such as Police Chief, Police Commissioner, and Fire Chief, roles that would have seemed bizarre for a woman only a few decades ago.

This demographic revolution brings with it a change that has been, depending on the issue in question, alternately denied and asserted.  Andrews bluntly asserts the obvious.  Females, far from being just the same as men, generally emphasize empathy over rationality, safety over risk, and cohesion over competition and hierarchy -- a values cocktail that currently blends nicely into Woke ideology.  Approximately two-thirds of men, for example, say free speech is more important than an inclusive society.  With women those preferences are reversed.  Generally speaking, females employ an ethic of caring whereas men are more focused on justice and facts.  In important venues, Andrews argues, this values reorientation will have significant or even disastrous effects.

Businesses more attentive to feminine HR directives and equity requirements are more likely to foster a collegial environment where feelings trump productivity and innovation.  In the academy most conservative views have long been unspeakable, but with the rise of feminist faculties the arena of acceptable debate has shrunk even further, and milk and cookies may be provided for fragile egos “triggered” by opposing perspectives.  In 2017, Google software engineer James Damore lost his job for speculating that women were underrepresented in its technical positions for biological reasons, an opinion that left him without a single colleague to back him up.  Years earlier a female MIT professor went into vapors when Harvard President Larry Summers made a similar suggestion that also cost him his post, a position held not long ago by a black female with plagiarism issues and a mediocre academic resume.    

Andrews reserves her most ominous warning for the field of law, about which she says, “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”  With respect to immigration, she notes, a system more attuned to feelings than existing law already prevails.  Border enforcement was ignored under Biden ostensibly out of compassion for “migrants” and their often non-existent families.  Currently ICE is vilified and obstructed from performing its congressionally mandated duty based largely on emotional objections.  Had Andrews given her talk this September, the Lindsay Clancy trial could have been employed as an another example of a feminized legal system, with jury members hoping to make things better for women, a goal already passionately expressed by pink-garbed demonstrators outside the courtroom. 

Facts, evidence, and established rules, Andrews insists, must be foremost in the practice of law, especially on the part of judges and prosecutors.  New York’s Letitia James could have served as Andrews’s poster girl for a contrary approach.  The A.G.’s pledge to use her office to jail Trump reminded Constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz of the procedure employed under Stalin:  “Show me the man; I’ll find the crime.”  In a recent political debate James endorsed the following prosecutorial methodology:  “You don’t have to look at the facts and the law.  All you have to do is study what they do.”  Add to those violations of procedure Senator Elissa Slotkin's threats against potential Trump aides and you have another example of the mentality that’s destroying the rule of law.

Andrews’s suggestion for avoiding the feminization of law, medicine, and business is to take the feminine thumb off the scales by undoing HR’s lawsuit-averse equity standards and workplace rules. That’s something easier said than done since most HR teams aren’t bothered by a statistical underrepresentation of men, nor are they eager to revise their equity mentality.  More difficult, and more to the point in my view, is the task of erasing  a cultural mantra that for half a century has calculated the worth of unpaid female homemakers raising their children at exactly zero.  That’s the tacit assumption behind male-female salary ratios that only count work done for hire and seldom compare similar job and experience levels to each other.  No wonder women nowadays value a career (71%) far more than getting married and raising a family (18-22%).  Changing that cultural dynamic dwarfs the HR obstacle which itself requires prior management initiative.

The rise of feminist majorities in major professions has given the multi-faceted poison of Wokeness an added boost, but power-hungry and cynical politicians, male and female, have been undermining the American legal system since Woodrow Wilson, while marriage and the family have been under attack since the 1960s.  Andrews rightly directs attention to profoundly negative consequences that accompany institutional feminization, but one must not ignore the fact that Marxists, Democrats, and Islamists have used that transformation for their own purposes, just as they’ve used immigration for political advantage.  Anyone confronting the maladies coincident with culture’s feminization should follow the money to see who is ultimately pulling the strings.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.