The Daily Signal - The Daily Signal Presents “The “Signal Sitdown - There's a Revolution Happening You've Never Heard Of. It's Called "The Great Feminization" | Helen Andrews

Episode Date: November 1, 2025

For the past half decade or more, conservative intellectuals have tried to answer the question: Where did woke come from?  Some believe it is rebranded cultural Marxism. Others say it came from academia with the postmodern rejection of objective truth ultimately leading to the weaponization of culture. Maybe it came from the global corporations because woke is the ideology of the new managerial elite in late-stage neo-liberalism. But perhaps “woke” and its offspring like “cancel culture” came from something called “The Great Feminization.”  Helen Andrews, author of “Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” recently wrote an essay called “The Great Feminization,” a term borrowed from the pseudonymous online writer J Stone, that explains how “woke” is “an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” She joins “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss. “We had a big fight called feminism in the 1970s over whether or not we thought women could be lawyers. And we decided that they could, and that's great,” Andrews explained. “But it took a long time to go from token representation of the kind that was achieved in the heyday of second wave feminism to what we have now.”  Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk. Business. Hi, Bradley Devlin here, politics editor of The Daily Signal, and I'm excited to share this episode of my show with The Daily Signal with you. The Signal Sitdown is one of the Daily Signal's other podcasts, and each show I bring you inside the biggest battles in Washington, D.C., with some of the biggest names in politics.

So if you like what you hear today, make sure you subscribe to the Signal Sitdown for weekly episodes. We'll see you there. Whokeness tended to show up in the most unexpected places. I think the moment that I knew, wokeness was different than PC or any of the old previous iterations, was when people started getting fired from NFL teams or from NASCAR. Now, why is NASCAR displaying wokeness?

You would think that would be the last place you would want to look to find it. And it didn't seem really to be ideological at all. The common pattern was feminization. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown, but before we get to the interview, we'd love it if you'd hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government, and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change. Without further ado, here's the interview.

Helen Andrews, welcome to the Signal Sitdown. Bradley Devlin, so happy to be here. So you've been talking about a new theory of where woke and cancel culture comes from, but for some reason it has something to do with Larry Summers resigning as president of Harvard University in 2006. Long before anybody ever heard the word woke. That's right. Larry Summers, well, the president of Harvard is always a very powerful person. But I think even by those standards, Larry Summers was an exceptionally powerful. president of Harvard. He had been in the Clinton cabinet. He had been at the World Bank. He was one of the most well-connected men in the Democratic Party. He was also enormously accomplished as an academic. He was just a really smart, sharp economist. And still very influential.

Still, yeah, he's still all of those things. Yeah. Whatever else he may be in addition. But that made it all the more shocking that he was felled by a scandal. And there were a lot of things going on during his presidency at Harvard and a lot of professors that he alienated that eventually led the faculty to have a vote of no confidence in him. But the one that mattered more than any other was a controversy where he was completely and entirely correct. And there was, in an objective sense, no scandal really at all. What had happened was the National Bureau of Economic Research had held a conference on women in science. And Summers had been invited to speak. on the subject of how to get more women into science.

And the remarks were supposed to be off the record, and they were also extemporaneous. So this was not delivered remarks. He was just giving his sincere assessment where the real barriers to women's advancement in the hard sciences lay. And he identified two that were a little bit difficult to talk about. The first is the male and female bell curves in terms of aptitude. You see this in a lot of other characteristics as well, that there are just tend to be more men at the extremes, both extremes, the extremes of lack of intelligence and also extremes of intelligence. So there are simply more men than women way out there at the tail end of the bell curve. And the other is consistent differences in interests.

That is, even when you do have women who are high-powered enough upstairs to make it as tenured Ivy League professors, they tend to be drawn to disciplines that in which are. involve human beings as opposed to really super abstract things like theoretical physics. So Larry Summers gave these remarks which were well within the scientific mainstream in terms of psychology and studies that have been done. And yet their response among the women professors in the audience was to say, how dare you? In fact, these women went to a reporter, which they were not supposed to do because the talk was to be off the record. But they went to a reporter and they said, I had to stand up and leave or else I would have fainted or I was about to throw up. Now, to be clear, there were also some

women in the audience who, when the New York Times called them to get their sense of this scandal, there was one economist Paula Stephen who gave the quote, this is what happens at a scientific conference. You hear ideas you disagree with and then you debate them on the basis of reason and evidence. But there were enough women who said that what Larry Summers had said was beyond the pale that they were able to extract from him not one but three statements of apology and eventually tar him as a misogynist. So these women were able to take down one of the most powerful men in America without ever really offering any evidence or even any argument that he was wrong. They just said that what he said was offensive, made them want to throw up.

And that is the style of debate that characterizes woeitness, not having conversations, but shutting down conversations. And this is interesting because I don't remember I wasn't politically active at the time. But I don't remember in my knowledge of the conservative movement, many people coming out and defending Larry Summers. I mean, I don't think a lot of people, yeah, exactly. I don't think a lot of people would want to have. a defender of Larry Summers on their resume, but nevertheless, it wasn't made into a cultural issue. It was just like, oh, the board at Harvard gave him a no confidence vote and there's going to be a change in leadership. But you read an article from a journalist named Jay Stone.

That's all that we know him by. He's not even a journalist. He's just a guy on the internet. guy on the internet who in 2019, I believe, connected this to the broader phenomenon that we were seeing in cancel culture and saying there were, this is not just brand new. This did not come out of nowhere. There are precedents for this at the top levels of American society. And you say, quote, the entire woke era could be extrapolated from that moment from the details of how summer was canceled and most of all who did the canceling, women. So tell us a little bit about this essay and extrapolate for us. It really was one of those moments where things that had been fuzzy crystallized instantaneously. It's a thesis where once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. Like a lot of people, I was puzzled by the eruption of wokenness. The summer of 2020 really seemed like an episode of mass hysteria. Just like the whole country went crazy.

And there have been a lot of theories for why, right? Some people theorize that it's social media, that it's all the phones now. And so we're living in this great global gossipy village. And that's why rumors and suspicion and woke targets tend to be taken down. Right. The monster with a thousand ears and a thousand eyes seems a little bit more real when you're on social media. That's right. And then there are other people who think that wokeness is a substitute religion

and that therefore is the decline of church attendance and church affiliation, the rise of the nuns, that leads to wokeness because that's just something that everybody needs, and if you don't get it from your church, you're going to get it from an ideology. There are some people who see an ideological genealogy of wokeness. They say it's cultural Marxism and that spread on the universities, and the universities infected everybody else, and that's why we got wokeness everywhere all at once. all of those theories have merit to them, but there were, in most cases, something about the mechanism didn't seem to be entirely clear to me. Right. If I may, I mean, one of the interesting things about the idea that it's just repurposed cultural Marxism, right? We're just, we've just branded it in a sexier way now. That doesn't fully track because if you go back to the Frankfurt School, I mean, some of the work that Irma-Marcusa was doing wasn't, quoting Marx for his theory of no tolerance for intolerance. He was quoting John Stuart Mill. He cites Mill 11 different times in that work. John Sturt Mill, the classically liberal guy,

the libertarian hero that, of course, went a little crazy at the end of his life and became a socialist. It was his wife. Yeah. That was Cherchet LaFaum in the case of Mill. That was the problem there. But that's why it's always been a curious intellectual track for me to say that this is just cultural Marxism rebranded. It's because we don't want to look within and our own sort of intellectual inheritance to see what the problems might be there. We can just say, oh, it's the dirty communists. Sometimes it is. But in this case, I think it's probably not. The weakness of the wokeness is cultural Marxism theory for me is that I saw wokeness erupt in areas of our society that are not remotely Marxist.

like big business, Fortune 500 companies. Whokeness tended to show up in the most unexpected places. I think the moment that I knew, wokeness was different than PC or any of the old previous iterations was when people started getting fired from NFL teams or from NASCAR. Now, why is NASCAR displaying wokeness? You would think that would be the last place you would want to live to find it. Or Wall Street firms, these are not hotbeds of wokeness.

And it didn't seem really to be ideological at all. The common pattern was feminization. That is, if you look at survey data, women are much less in favor of free speech than men. Typically, if you ask women, would you allow to speak on your campus somebody who said that transgenderism was a mental illness? would you allow to speak on your campus somebody who said that Black Lives Matter is a hate group women are much more likely to say no shut that down and men are much more likely to say

I disagree but let him speak and we'll talk it out um wokeness seems to me like a repudiation of rational debate and as I read through this essay by the pseudonymous J. Stone it seemed to he he made the case

that these woke patterns of behavior match female group dynamics in ways that are sort of deeply encoded in human society and have been explored by experts and found to just be ineradicable. So unpack that a little bit more for us, these patterns of female behavior, at some points, I believe he and you use the term feminine modes. What is feminine about this? Because you had a critic from the New York Times, one David French, who I've been doing a good job not hate reading David French, but when I saw that he was writing in response to your essay, I instantly clicked on that and read it. And he's not very nice to you, of course.

of course, you know, evangelical Christianity needs to be a whole lot nicer, except for all the people that I disagree with. He says that you're kind of ignorant of men and you idolize men and that you're ignorant of history. And he says, don't you know the French Revolution? There were purges and the guillotine. Wasn't women up there cutting people's heads off? It was men. And I think that goes to your point that there's been purges and cancellations, if you want to call them that, throughout history. This is something very different. It's funny. I also usually don't read David French, but I did read this one. And I was talking over this column with a friend of mine who happens to have a PhD in political theory and is an expert in specifically, you know, the thought

of the era of the French Revolution, so he knows more about French political thinkers than anybody I've ever met. Somebody has to do it. I know. He had something to say in David French's defense, which I thought was really fascinating. He said, well, you know, I guess we definitely can lay the French Revolution at the foot of masculinity because it was a rhetorical trope of the Jackabins that, you know, that the political system of France under the king and the royalists had been dominated by whispering

and the conversations of the salon and the court. It's very, very feminine politics that has corrupted this town. That's right. And it has been secret. What we need to have, they said, is open, manly arguments where we talk to each other directly. None of this whispering and rumor and courtly nonsense at the salon. We need to have open manly arguments. So that was. And in that case, it led to people getting their heads cut off, but I don't see any reason why that should necessarily follow one from the other. But that is true. Right. So that's a masculine mode of... That's right. There are masculine modes of failure. Men do crazy things and so do women.

Right. Maybe again coming to French's defense, wouldn't you rather have the feminine failure over the masculine failure? If the masculine failure, is people bleeding out in the middle of the town square. And the feminine failure is a bunch of gossip. A bunch of gossip that makes you... Much lower body count. Right. And that alienates you from society. I mean, this is the type of alienation that Tocqueville talks about in a republic,

in a Republican democracy, right? That you might not be killed, but you might be debanked. You might not be welcome in the marketplace. You might not have an easy time fitting in with your choice. church community or your bowling league or whatever you might be up to, that is a terrible fate for anyone. It's inhuman to do that to somebody else, but it's not killing them. That's true. Although one downside of that is that you have a lack of accountability. It's always the actions of the mob. If you're being punished, you always want to have one authority that you

can appeal to as opposed to appealing to a diffuse group of faceless individuals. It is true that masculine modes of conduct and feminine ones each have their own failure modes and that the masculine ones tend to have higher body counts. And I guess my position is that failure is bad either way, but that we need to tailor it to the purposes of an institution. Think about something like a university. What is a university for? It's for finding and transmitting the truth.

And truth only marches on. We only discover new things and get rid of old bad theories. Thanks to those unique eccentric individuals who are willing to be the first one to put their hand up and say, I disagree. I believe something that nobody else does. And I think I can defend it. And I'm going to have the backbone to stand up and try. Right. Like those eccentric weirdos are what keep knowledge moving forward.

So if you are a university, you definitely do not want to have a social atmosphere of conformity. You do not want people able to shut down new ideas just because they are offensive or don't fit in or make somebody feel bad. Now, if you were running a different kind of institution, that might be fine. For example, do you know what the most feminized industry or the most feminized profession in America is today? It is veterinary medicine. Oh, I would have guessed nursing, but this is nursing for dogs. That's even more, that's even more feminine than my answer. And farm animals.

It's not just pets. That's true. There's true. And I think 80% of veterinary students today are female, which is a huge change from 40 years ago. I feel like the feminization of veterinary medicine is not a huge problem. I think that's fine. I think it has not corrupted veterinary medicine in any way that I'm particularly worried about because the norms of feminine group conduct are not antithetical to veterinary medicine.

But they might be if you're something like a university professor. So it all has to be context-specific. Feminization is not always a terrible thing. You have to examine its effects based on what is the purpose of the institution you're looking at. So I want to return to different industries and the great feminization's impact on different industries in a second. First, I want to take an opportunity to really try to define our terms here because wokeness has entered, I think, the canon of words that had so much meaning for a very short period. of time and then it faded into meaninglessness. Another one of these words is globalization, right? Globalization

meant everything in the 90s or the early 2000s. And then it proceeded to mean nothing during the era of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It meant nothing and it meant everything at the same time, right? Trump comes along and says, this word means nothing and everything at the same time. I'm going to co-opt it and use it for my political ends, which I think is genius. And Republicans, seeing that precedent, has seen woke, which is a, it's a street term origin, right, from the culture. And Republicans have seen that and co-opted it to explain what they are against, right? Common sense versus wokeness is the deep well to which most Republicans in Congress go to whenever they have a difficult question to answer,

and they're not really sure how to answer it on the policy front. So let's define our terms. In the context of great feminization, what is woke? What is cancer culture? The intrusion of identity politics into previously neutral arenas and the erection of taboos

surrounding what kinds of things you are and aren't allowed to question, hiding more and more debatable claims behind curtains of how dare you push back on that. That's my lived experience. Incidentally, just to connect this back to feminization, one of the consistent differences between men and women that was cited by the original pseudonymous Jay Stone is that women tend to be much more caring towards people they regard as victims, much more solicitors towards the weak, which is, why women tend to be more liberal in their politics in the sense of wanting to look out for the poor or the disabled or anybody that they see as being powerless in some way. This is why women tend to be squishes on the subject of immigration. So if you are able to frame a political issue as

looking out for a weak or a victim class, then it is much easier to get women on board with it. And I think that is what wokeness does across the board every time. You know, it says that during the Me Too movement, we need to believe all women because women are an oppressed victim class and therefore it violates our taboos to question them or say that this particular accuser might have ulterior motives. You're not allowed to say that. Or to push back on the Black Lives Matter movement because these people are also a sacred victim class or trans people are a sacred victim class and you're not allowed to question their lived experience. And wokeness rolls along by continuing to accumulate more and more sacred victim classes that you're not allowed to question. And so if wokeness is, let's say, wokeness is the disease. One of the symptoms, perhaps, is cancel culture.

Quoting from your piece now, cancel, and this is quoting from your piece, but paraphrasing J. Stone. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. So based on this hierarchical arrangement or a reshuffling of a proper hierarchical arrangement, they then go to cancel those who, what is their objective? Who just stand against this hierarchical reshuffling, who are actively opposing it? what's the purpose of the cancellation? To preserve group cohesion. So under masculine norms of conduct, conflict is not the end of the world.

Disagreement is sort of okay. You're able to have somebody disagree with you and you're not going to take it personally or think of it as a catastrophe. You say, okay, that guy over there disagrees with me. I think the world will carry on with each of us adhering to our own particular opinions. whereas in feminine group dynamics, women are much more likely to gang up on the dissenter and say, wow, you're really rocking the boat here, you're upsetting everybody. Do you want to apologize?

Because if you don't, I think maybe we need to exclude you from the group because you're pausing too much harm. So that's kind of, and this has been examined by psychologists in really simple experiments, right, where you're a psychologist and you've got a clinic and you say, all right, I'm going to run an experiment where I get a group of all boys and a group of all girls. And I'm going to present them with a task and I'm going to see what happens. And you really do see that the men will shout at each other and have conflict and then settle into a pecking order and there will be kind of a top dog and he'll tell the other ones what you do. And then at the end of the mom of three boys, you have no idea what That looks like at all.

I know. I know. The top dog can be magnanimous or not depending on his mood, thinking about my oldest. And then women will not establish a hierarchy. And even before in a female group, before they even address the task that you've given them, like you've given them a puzzle to put together or whatever, they will first go around the circle and introduce each other and say, okay, let's take turns. where are you from? Let's bond. The men will not do that at all. Like, even if you tell them,

I want you to, I'm going to be evaluating you on group cohesion at the end of this, so you need to get to know each other. I don't care where you're from. Let's do the thing. Men are task oriented, whereas women are relationship oriented. And neither one is better than the other. Both of them are great. It's just that for different purposes, one might be more well-suited or not. If you're trying to get something done, to get something done guys might have a lot going for them. If you're trying to build an institution that's going to last, that has relationships that will endure, something that will help your community, then that you might want to go to a more female dominated institution. It all depends on the purpose. Right. And you don't need to go deep into psychology to understand

if you're not interested in picking up briefs on these various studies that have been conducted, right? I mean, just look at social media. I mean, or just stand-up comedy. It's one of the oldest jokes out there. I mean, my wife showed me a video on Instagram last night, and it was a man in his 30s making coffee, and the caption was, point of view, you just decided to let your wife host the Wednesday morning Bible group at 7 a.m. in your house. And so he's pouring. And so he's pouring himself a cup of coffee and with an echo effect attached to it. His wife is reading this script saying, how are you? What's going on? And he's just there with a thousand yards stare drinking his coffee, right? That's not how men operate. Men, they would have come in, sat down,

got themselves a cup of coffee, not talked about the day, not talk about what the dog, what's going on with the dog at the vet, whatever. What's the verse? What is the verse? What is the What are we doing today? Get down to business. Although, if I can jump on that for just a second, there is nothing older than differences between the sexes and gender conflict. But I never pass up an opportunity to emphasize that the great feminization is something new. Men and women have always operated in different ways and had conflicts based on that. But there has never been a society in the history of planet earth where women have been a majority of lawyers or a majority of doctors or a majority of managers in management positions in businesses and nonprofits.

Yes. That is just completely unprecedented. So whether or not you think feminization is a problem, everybody, even people who hate me and think I'm a hater, need to acknowledge that we are in uncharted territory here. Like the great feminization is definitely going to cause new. challenges or new changes to the way society functions that we have never seen before, not our country, not any country. So if you listen to the things I'm saying and say, well, that sounds apocalyptic, that sounds crazy. I know men and women are different, but they're

not that different. These are huge sweeping changes you're talking about. Is that really what we're going to see? And I have to come back and hammer. Yes, because we are in unprecedented territory. Yeah. Well, this is something that Jordan Peterson got in trouble for some five years. years ago when he did an interview with Vox, where a Vox or some, I forget it was Vox or something like that, but a Vox-like publication, sent a reporter to Jordan Peterson's house to interview him. And he was talking about, Jordan, why are you highlighting all these differences between men and women? Don't you think we're all individuals? And Jordan gave his reply and the rebuttal was, but we have both men and women in the workplace. That seems

to have worked out pretty good for everybody, right? Everybody's richer. Men and women get to take home the page and get to bring home the bacon, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Jordan just kind of cut him off and said, I think the verdict is still very much out on that question. And he was pilloried for it. I know that for years under your tutelage, I know that this is in something that you've been thinking about for quite some time, particularly when it comes to modes of failure with feminization, right? that the important part was that a conversation was had, less so that the conversation yielded results. And this was something that came across in Kathy Young's response to you in the bulwark, prioritization of group cohesion.

I thought this was so interesting. She says she doesn't want to give you the satisfaction of proving her point, but still engages in this necessary exercise. So let me read this quote. quote, let's not mince words. This is a grotesquely misogynistic screed. The inevitable rejoinder, of course, is that such a charge is not a rebuttal. Facts don't care about your feelings. And if you're a woman who says that Andrew's narrative is noxious instead of asking whether it's true, you're actually proving her point. Well, I mean, the question is, why is she compelled to engage

in this exercise at all? If she knows it's going to cut her argument off at the knees, why do it? and and sorry I don't mean you to be turning into psychologist for Kathy Young I don't wish that on anybody I don't know why Kathy Young is is the way she is but one one aspect of her article is something that I've seen from a lot of criticisms of the essay that I wrote which is that I made the point in an inflammatory way or in a not sufficiently intellectually serious way and they held up or they hold up as an alternative that was a better articulation of this feminization thesis, the work of Corey Clark, who I admire a great deal. PhD, Haver, credentialed academic, doing good original work on the coincidence of the feminization of institutions and the rise of wokeness within them and the survey data that shows that women

tend to adhere more closely to woke ideology. I don't have any problem with the peer-reviewed high-quality academic work that Corey Clark and her colleagues put out on the subject of feminization, but I think it's a sufficiently important topic that people other than peer-reviewed academics should be able to join the conversation. I also think that there are aspects of feminization that are not always clear to peer-reviewed academics that don't always show up in their national surveys of political opinion, are more likely to come from firsthand experience, anecdotal experience of what it's like to live, what it's like to work in an office where the HR lady has a veto over everything, you know, or observations of how woke cancellations occur. Like a storyteller will have a lot to say about how feminization is or is not reflected in that. So. And you imagine the type of vetoes

that are existent in peer-reviewed journals. That's, oh yeah, self-censorship. And that's, this is, Anytime you're talking about gender differences, you need to think about what kinds of expertise you're going to accept or reject. And for a lot of people, they assume that the kind of expertise that's going to matter the most is that of psychologists and gender psychologists particularly. I am all in favor of the scientific method and subjecting hypotheses to empirical study. However, I note as a matter of history that psychologists in general and gender psychologists specifically have a track record of saying things that are completely crazy that common sense would have told you was completely absurd. The trans stuff is the most obvious example where they are saying things that are transparently false. But leaving that aside, even for the moment, it was the gender psychologists

throughout the 80s and 90s who assured us that gender was pure socialization. They were the one saying, hey, guys, I did a study. And it turns out if you give your daughter trucks for Christmas instead of dolls, all of this gender stereotype stuff will disappear. Now, those were peer-reviewed study, those were experts and professors who were saying these things. And it was definitely an example of the common phenomenon where the people who are most credentialed in a subject say the most insane things. And that you would have been better off at that time listening to somebody with common sense or somebody with four kids who says, I've got daughters and sons, and let me tell you, they're different. So I appreciate the contribution of academics and experts to this conversation, but I don't think

they should be the only ones there. And I also tend to think that one of the reasons why people privilege the academics who weigh in on this over nobody's and journalists and, you know, people without fancy credentials like yours, truly, is that the academics are more likely to say, well, we can't say if it's good or bad. I'm just presenting data. I'm not coming to a judgment. It's got pluses and minuses. We just need to think seriously or think critically about this new development.

Whereas I think at this point, it's more important to be able to say, look, if the trends of wokeness within the legal field continue on the trajectory they are on now, that will lead to the end of the rule of law, and that will not be an interesting new development that has some pluses and minuses. That will be a catastrophe. That is something that we don't need to study. We need to prevent. So that's where I'm coming from. I think some of these problems caused by feminization demand solutions. They are huge problems that threaten to harm a lot of people and that need to be addressed with some urgency. Well, that's such a good point. I mean, borrowing a term from Anton, the celebration parallax where it was in the 80s and 90s,

these gender psychologists were demanding that we have fat Barbie because we need to, you know, soft in our gender stereotypes and our gendered expectations, because all of this is socialized at the end of the day. Well, fast forward 25 years later after transgenderism starts to take off and people who are doing the work to show that transgender ideology and transgender identity, you know, is a social contagion when it enters particular friend groups that seems to at least have a touch point with the idea that gender is socialized, right? But any study that suggested that it was a social contagion was suppressed by peer-reviewed

academic journals. And so when Kathy points to this alternative from psychologists and from academic journals, I think maybe she just has a way more trust in the scientific system, big science than you and I. Maybe that's true. But I think there's a point to be made about the great feminization and the appeal to the expert class. That's always a method for them to create social cohesion. This was particularly on display with COVID. where we had to trust Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci

as a matter of social cohesion. So you say in your piece, everything you think of as wokeness is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization. Where are we in this march of demographic feminization when we look at these various industries? A lot of these industries began to admit women for the first time in the 1960s and 70s.

In the late 1960s, women were 5% of the lawyers in America. It was very rare for a woman to go to law school. But we had a big fight called feminism in the 1970s over whether or not we thought women could be lawyers and we decided that they could. And that's great. But it took a long time to go from token representation of the kind that was achieved in the heyday of secondary feminism to what we have now. And this is why the great feminization thesis resonates with me so strongly. is because just the timing fits. Law schools became majority female in 2016.

Other institutions that became majority female in the last 10 years off in the last five years. University professors, you thought it would have been earlier. I would have guessed it would have been earlier. But no, that tipped over only just in the last five years. Medical schools became majority female in the last five years. The white-collar workforce overall, most workers with a college degree in America are women.

There was a brief period after the financial crisis when a majority of workers, period, were women. And imagine going back a century and explaining that to somebody. We had been debating whether women could be in the professional workforce at all, and now they were a majority of the workers in your economy. That's astonishing and definitely an inversion of ordinary human family-forming patterns. Managers in America, management positions, 46% of those management positions today are help women, so not quite a majority, but getting there. And then the other type of feminization that is notable and that we definitely need to pay attention to is fields that have become

overwhelmingly feminized. I talked before about veterinary medicine and how that's 80% female. That's also the case in psychology. 75% of PhDs and the topic of psychology today are awarded to women. And that particular field, I think, is. an important one for us to study because that is a field where feminization has clearly not been the result of women just out-competing men. There are some people who look at law schools and white-collar workers tipping majority female and say, well, men, you just got to get your act together. You're getting your butt kicked.

Come on. It's just that women are that much better in these fields. If that were the case, if feminization were the result of women finally having a fair chance to compete with men and rising to the level of their talents, then you would expect to see, in most of the fields where women entered, 50-50 gender parity and then a rough equilibrium, right? Like you would expect them to rise to their share of the population and then stay roughly in that ballpark thereafter.

But that's not what we see happen. even in law schools, they were 50% female and they've gotten more female every year since. The staff of the New York Times got 50% female and then a little bit more female. And now I think it's 55, 56% female. Women are increasingly becoming more and more of the undergraduate population too. That's true. Although that is one where they have been a majority of undergraduate students for about 40 years. And in fact, even in 1900, college students,

roughly equal men and women. A lot of women went to college in America 100 years ago, because at that time, America was one of the most feminist countries in the world. We liked educating our women. It has never been the general sense in the United States that women were not deserving of education or were not equipped for education. There are some patriarchal cultures that are like that, where if you have a family and you have sons and daughters, you will send the sons to school, but never, ever, ever the daughters. That's just not the way it was in America. be proud of that and have every reason to be proud of that. It's because so many women became teachers. And of course you want teachers to have advanced educations. So there are some forms of

feminization that I think are enduring. I think a resilient. I think, you know, elementary school teachers are likely to continue to be majority female no matter what we do. But are men fleeing employment at the New York Times or graduate departments in psychology because they are afraid of competition? Or are they fleeing these institutions because they have become hotbeds of gossip and backbiting and whatever the heck was going on when they drove Barry Weiss out of that institution? That seemed really toxic in quite a feminine way to me. So if feminization tends to be accompanied by some toxic behaviors and that's what's causing men to flee these institutions, then that's not healthy competition. That is a toxic dynamic that we should stop.

And that's so interesting. I mean, the fact that they, I don't want to make it sound too nefarious, but women enter institutions, they achieve parity in the process kind of changing how that institution works. And once that institution is remade, there's no equilibrium. The march just continues. And so what does this mean for someone who's trying to do. trying to trace the great feminization back to its roots. I mean, is this an ideological problem? Did this start with the first women going to school? I think you've entered that in part. Or is this simply a numbers problem? Like, there's a critical mass that needs to be achieved, that this is simply a matter of personnel in the pipeline rather than the ideology that might be pushing folks in that direction. In many cases, it is purely a matter of. demographics. It's something that happens naturally once you get enough women in an institution. And it is something that happens without any of the women really intending for it to happen at all.

Very often if you've got an English department at a college campus that was all male and is now majority of female, the modes of interaction in your department faculty meetings are going to be extremely different. And it's not necessarily because your department head is now a woman and she has laid down new rules. It's just because the emergent dynamics of the way people find it acceptable to interact with each other tend to be different between men and women. And this is why it's important to make clear that women who thrived under the old system, the corporate go-getting gal with shoulder pads who was up there in Wall Street in the 1980s.

Like that career woman was exceptional. I mean, she was clearly a woman of amazing talent and ambition. She too will find it very difficult to flourish in today's office where if you give direct negative feedback to your subordinate, they can go tattle on you to the HR lady and she's going to come tell you that you were being abusive and write up a citation or something, right? Like these norms of let's all be nice to each other

are very hard on men, but they're also very hard on women who prefer the masculine modes of interaction. And it's not something that anybody does on purpose. It really isn't, which is why it would be inappropriate to blame women in some kind of moral sense for the great feminization. It's not that they are trying to change these institutions. It's just that that's what tends to happen. So I guess the question then is who is to blame? And you mentioned the woman with shoulder pads.

in the 80s. One of the pieces that I loved from your book, Boomers, which is a series of profiles of prominent boomers to kind of explain where boomers went wrong, right? They promised liberation and they delivered disaster. One of my favorite lines from that is the story that you get of America in the 20th century, 50s, kids, greasers and watching TV and 60s, hippie-divis. Hippie-Divis. HIPPie hanging out and 80s buckling down, getting serious financialization, making money. This is not stories of the generations that grew up in that decade. It is a single story of a single generation, that generation being the boomers. The story of America is what was happening to us at that time.

Happening to us at that time. And so if you are a woman in the 1980s with the shoulder pads making a lot of money, you're probably a boomer, right? And you benefited from that 1970s feminization that kind of put us down this path eventually. Does this trace back to the boomers? What impact has the boomers had on this? It's funny. Claudia Golden is an economist who won the Nobel Prize for her work on women in the workplace.

She's clearly somebody whose work is relevant to our discussion. one of the most interesting findings that she made is something that's kind of common knowledge, at least among women, which is that the first generation of corporate go-getters tended almost uniformly to be childless. That it was just society decided we were going to let women into these competitive careers, but we were not going to make any accommodations for them to allow them to have kids. And therefore, either they wanted kids and it never came together, or they understood that this was going to be an either-or proposition. And so there have been various balances that we've tried in women in the workforce versus childbearing over the years.

You have the have kids first and then have a career model. That's what Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg did. You have the get a career first and then have one, maybe two kids at the end if you can squeeze them in model. That tended to be the successor generation after the 80s go-getter, women who were attaining the heights. of their careers in the 90s. And now we've got more of a hybrid mode where if you look statistically at women who are pursuing professional careers, they tend to continue to be in the workforce, but make it part-time. They tend to juggle both things simultaneously in a way that they didn't do before. And I think there are pluses and minuses to all of these different models. I think

some of them work well, some of them maybe don't work so well. But it is a problem. problem that our discussion of women in the workplace has tended to be laser focused on that issue, right? When do women fit in having kids? And we have not discussed nearly enough the effect of introducing women into the workforce on these institutions. So when we talk about women's ambition, we think about the effect on them and the effect on their families. Both very important things, but we should also talk on the effect on institutions as well. Although actually, now that I mentioned it. One thing that we haven't brought up at all so far is birth rates and the fertility crisis, but to flash back to the Jordan Peterson quote that you mentioned, which is, yes,

we've brought women into the workplace and you know what, juries out on whether that has been a success or not. One of the ways that it could eventually prove to be a catastrophic failure and something that we tried and did not work is if it craters our birth rates. It could be that by trying to have this model of simultaneously having careers and kids that we just drive our birth rate into the ground, and that's a huge problem. So, yeah, the great feminization is huge and unprecedented and a demographic reality. It has the potential to ruin civilization in one of two ways, or maybe both ways. One would be cratering birth rates and the other would be feminizing our institutions to the point where they no longer function. So those are two huge problems staring our society in the face.

And I see a lot of people talking about the birth rates one, which is good because we don't have a good solution to that one yet. We need to talk about it more until we figure out what to do about it. But I don't see a lot of people talking about the feminization of our institutions problem. Let's talk about the feminization of our institutions. You're incredibly concerned about the great feminization's impact on the legal profession, in particular the rule of law. why? Because I think that the feminization of the law will tend to make our grown-up legal system look more and more like the Title IX courts that we had for sexual assault on college campuses, which removed due process protections because who was going to benefit from them, men, and they were probably all rapists anyway, so who cares? And then some of the court cases that arose out of the Me Too movement also.

violated some really important due process protections. I think there were huge flaws in the Harvey Weinstein, New York court case, which is why the New York Court of Appeals later overturned that conviction, because there were so many problems with that court case and so many instances of due process that were violated. It was as if we all decided that Harvey Weinstein was a bad guy, therefore he needed to be in jail regardless of what the actual legal outcome, whether the, whether the prosecution prove their case or not. And this is the area of the essay that I've gotten the most pushback on. I say that, you know, even the liberal lady lawyers that I know have the utmost respect for the rule of law. And that's true. And of course, there are lots of really great capable female lawyers. But my response would be this. If you are looking for examples of female lawyers saying clearly for the record, I don't care what the law says I'm going to follow my feelings, you will be unlikely to find examples of that happening. Even in cases where that is transparently, clearly what's going on. The example I would offer is Sarah Kainig, who is the serial lady,

the serial podcast lady. When Adnan Syed's murder conviction was overturned, briefly, it's back now. But when it was overturned, it was on procedural grounds. The women who were working so hard on his behalf to exonerate him found some failures of the prosecution to disclose certain items of evidence. And it was on that basis that his conviction was briefly overturned. So if you asked those lawyers who brought that motion to exonerate Syed, what they were doing, they would have said, we are adhering to the rule of law. But I listened to the serial podcast, and it is very clear to me that it is not out of concern for the rule of law that the true crime podcast listening middle-aged women of America convinced themselves that this poor guy was actually

innocent, even though all of the evidence in the case pointed in his direction. It really was emotional. It was, and you can hear Sarah Koenig say this on the serial podcast. She says, I don't think he did it because he seems like a nice guy. He doesn't seem like a psychopath. I've seen him show emotion toward me. Come on, lady. And of all the various corruptions of the rule of law, coddling violent criminals would have to be the one

that poses the greatest threat to your listeners, to you and me living here in Washington, D.C. It's a huge problem. Right. People being unwilling to enforce the rule of law on people who are threats to, public safety, right? So it's just a denialism that that is very apparent in that podcast. That's right. I don't want to believe that this person that I had a normal conversation with

could murder me violently because what does that mean for your safety, whether you're a man or a woman, but particularly if you're a woman, what does that mean for your public safety if this guy that you can have a pleasant conversation with over the phone from jail could murder you? Although, let me throw a twist in this story. Sarah Kane, stepfather, who I think married her mother when she was 10 or 11 years old, so who raised her, was also a famous writer. Peter Matheson, whose work may be known to some listeners. He's a very famous, very, very accomplished writer, very good guy.

But he did the same thing. He was the most passionate advocate for Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist who was pardoned sort of wrongly, I think, by Joe Biden on like these last week and off. Okay. That guy. That guy. I know that guy. Who shot an FBI agent point blank in the head.

But he came to Peter Matheson with some sob story saying, oh, it wasn't me. I was there, but I didn't shoot him. And Peter Matheson said, oh, yeah, no, it was an FBI conspiracy to frame Leonard Peltier. So let me just say, Peter Matheson's a man, and he fell for that scam, right? So it's not just women who fall for the scam of the charming. psychopathic murderer who you, you know, convinces them that they're innocent. But I think as a statistical matter, a justice system that is dominated demographically by women will tend to have that kind of thing happen more often than one dominated by men.

And it's something that already happens too much. So I'm really, really worried about what will happen if we go. The legal profession might be particularly vulnerable. But you say that there are some industries that are less vulnerable. math engineering stem. That makes sense, right? But the great feminization has come for those industries to a certain degree. They've been able to maintain themselves. But there's an increasing number of female engineers, there's an increasing number of female mathematicians. And I guess the second question on top of that is, do the engineers and the mathematicians

actually need to be women? Or at an engineering firm, does there just need to be enough women staffing departments that are auxiliary to the engineering that's done at Boeing to feminize it? So if your marketing team is women, if your HR team, that's always the one that people go to, is predominantly women. If your legal team, your general counsel's office, is predominantly women. Do the engineers actually need to become women to be feminized? This is exactly the pattern that you see in a lot of tech companies. But yeah, I don't worry about the feminization of fields like math and engineering because just as an observation, women tend not to go into those fields because they're, you know, for the Larry Summers reasons we were talking about earlier. And the

women who do go into those fields tend to be exceptional and then to adapt very well to the male ways. but the cancellation that one that touched me really deeply was the the guy who got canceled over the bimboes on his shirt he was wearing like the Hawaiian shirt type with the with the busty ladies on it that some friend had made for him like a bowling shirt or something and this guy I forget what astonishing thing he had done he had just landed a satellite on a moving comet something truly extraordinary Really impressive. This is like a Palmer Lucky character who's doing satellite stuff. Exactly. And he looked like a fun, goofy Palmer Lucky type guy. But he had done something scientifically extraordinary. And a reporter had been on hand to ask his comments on this amazing thing that he'd done.

And he got canceled because he was wearing this stupid bowling shirt with busty ladies on it. And people said that he was being a misogynist. And he gave a tearful apology. He said, you guys don't understand? I had a female friend who made this shirt for me and I wore it as a favor to her because this is we're just having fun. I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to disrespect women. It was degrading. I thought, how can you do this to somebody who's just accomplished something so amazing? So that's the way it goes down in a lot of tech companies. You have people who are doing amazing things with technology, but who are then vetoed or corralled by people in their HR department, and that's really all it takes. But the weapon that

these school marms in the HR department have to wield is federal law, because it is illegal as a matter of anti-discrimination law to have a workplace that is unwelcoming to women. And that has been interpreted by judges extremely broadly. So you can't even have a workplace that is testosterone-fueled, that is, you know, unwelcoming to women in subtle ways. Never mind banning open discrimination, sure, okay, that sounds like a good rule to have, but having, you know, it's illegal to have a workplace atmosphere that is too testosterone-fueled, too frat-like. women have sued companies for that, for things as subtle as that. And one. So when the HR lady goes to the boss and says, you know, so-and-so is wearing his busty lady's shirt today, I think you need to tell

him to go home and never, ever wear it again, the boss is going to defer to her because she says, if you don't, we might have a lawsuit on our hands. So the... Not just lawsuit, massive financial penalties. in the millions of... You said nine figures were some of these things. The record is $215 million. And the most important thing, well, the two most important things about these laws that make them so prodigious are one, they only go one way.

You can sue your boss for having a workplace that is too testosterone-fueled. You cannot sue him for being too estrogen-fueled or being too feminized. Like if you are sitting through some painfully ridiculous kindergarten-y cut-out pictures from a magazine and make a collage about your feeling stupid team building. I'm sorry. Anyone who's ever lived through one of those will understand. If you're going through one of those, you can't say, excuse me, I'm not a kindergartner. This is offensive to me. Because the law only goes one way. And the other thing that's pretty ambitious about them is that it's never clear where the line is. Right. Like it's, it would be one thing if we passed a law that said,

you cannot wear t-shirts with busty ladies on them, right? But the way the law stands now, there's a lot of behavior that falls into the gray area of, not technically illegal, but potentially somebody who filed a gender discrimination lawsuit could bring it up. And so that is not the way law should be. I think law should be clear. I think if you go to the lawyer for your company and say, I want to do X, is it legal or not legal, he should be able to give you a clear answer. not have to give you an answer of, it depends.

This anti-discrimination law is part of a broader civil rights regime. You call this the holy trifecta for the boomers. Civil rights, women's liberation, and sexual liberation or the gay movement. Those two things definitely go together, though people try to separate them as much as possible. are more in favor of gay rights and gay marriage by double digits, just hugely dramatically. That was the case during the gay marriage debate. So yes, gay marriage is a consequence of women's increasing political power. That is a statement beyond controversy.

And this is the holy trifecta for them, as you point out in your book. This is the legacy that the boomers created. And you can see them holding on very intensely to that. legacy, any questioning, even on the right, folks like Pat Buchanan who come in and question the operations of the civil rights regime, not the merits of not discriminating against black people. Right. That's fair.

But the operations of the civil rights regime, that was forbidden. Of course it's forbidden on the left, no surprise there. It's forbidden on the right too because of the boomers. Which is ironic because they weren't even responsible for it. It's the same way, it's worse in England. A lot of things are worse in England. But this particular one, there's... That's been the motto of our country for 250 years.

It's worse in England. Yes. But the boomers there talk about the, you know, Dunkirk spirit and the spirit of the Blitz and keep calm and carry on. It's like, no, no, no. The whole point of the baby boom is that it happened after World War II. You were not there for this. And even if you had been there, you would have been an infant.

This is not your generation. This is not even close to your generation. Why are you piggybacking off of this... World War II spirit. I don't know. That's what they do in England. But we do something equally worse here, which is the boomers, you know, anytime you point out any criticism, like you say,

Black Lives Matter, those three words together, I would agree with. But in terms of the gist of their movement, they seem to be making claims about the frequency of unarmed black men being shooting by police that are not backed up by data. The boomer response to that is to say, you know, how dare you would have turned them back at the admin. Pettus Bridge or whatever. But that's ironic because the baby boomers were mostly born, you know, in the late 40s, mostly born in the 1950s, which meant that they were not there when Martin Luther King

was marching. They were not around for that. They were in school. That's right. So for them to claim the moral mantle of all of that is even feminism precedes them. It was only once they came on the scene, both, you know, all of those movements tended to get a lot worse and a lot less morally admirable. So it's the addition of the boomers to those social movements did not improve them in terms of their moral standing at all. And yet they just use it as a cover for everything. And to pair the boomers with the great feminization and woke, right, the great feminization theory of woke versus the cultural Marxist theory of woke, like the boomers aren't Marxists. They're not communists in the way in which we've come to think about them. They're very corporate.

They're very capitalist sometimes to their own detriment, right? If I've been told many times that if I would just work harder and if the generations before me would just work harder, they would be able to afford that nice house all the while setting laying the groundwork for an economy where folks and families are caught into it. income traps. The other thing that the boomers seem to have unleashed is the growth of our economy in pink-collar jobs versus blue-collar jobs. In 1970, manufacturing made up about 25% of employment in the United States. Of course, most of that employment to men. It's less than 10% now. Around 8,000, Now, at the same time, the employment in pink-collar jobs, these are educational outfit jobs, these are health care service jobs, your hospice nurse, for example, that has exploded,

doubled, maybe tripled in the same time period as the employment in the blue-collar manufacturing trade has declined from 25 to 8%. Tell us a little bit about pink collar jobs and where this fits into the boomer ethos and the great feminization. It is, it's squarely at the center of the great feminization because you get a lot of people saying that the great feminization is inevitable, that it is just a natural development in civilized societies that more and more women have the advantage in the workplace. They say that in the jobs of today's economy, brute strength is no longer as important. And soft skills that women excel in are more important. I don't think that sounds, that doesn't sound right to me. I can just as easily imagine someone saying, in today's economy,

technology is more important than it's ever been. And men tend to be more left brain. So that, of course, that's why men flourish in today's economy, because they're more technologically minded. So I think you could tell a lot of different stories, and it doesn't quite, it's not as pat as that. It is certainly true that if you get rid of all your manufacturing jobs and replace them with home health aids, that will be bad for men and good for women. But if you get rid of all your manufacturing jobs and replace them with home health aids, I don't think that is a sign of an advanced economy. That is not a sign of an economy that is moving in the right direction. I mean, it's literally a sign of a country that's dying. That's right. And this is a convenient

arrangement because both, you know, all the political issues that I care about are moving in the same direction. One consequence of the rise of pink collar jobs and the decline of blue collar jobs is the marriage crisis. If women are more likely to get jobs and men are less likely to get jobs, they won't peril. And in fact, we saw that. They have done studies looking at marriage rates in counties that were hit by the China shock. And they were hit by the marriage crisis most strongly because the men were no longer marriageable. A job in a household is not something that you can just transfer from one party to the other and expect to get the same rate of family formation.

It really is men's economic flourishing that tends to drive whether people get married or not. So it is important for having a next generation at all to make sure that men have good jobs, good stable jobs that they can hold. And then it also happens to be the case that it's, important that we have good manufacturing in this country so that China doesn't build all our stuff and then strangle us. So all of these things are pointing in the same direction of needing to get rid of all of these parasitic pink collar jobs that don't actually produce value in an ultimate sense and bring back more manufacturing ones. But yeah, people say that the great feminization

is a sign of an economy that's advancing and becoming more and more civilized. To me, I look at it And it looks like a sign of an economy that is degenerating. Well, and being across the street from Capitol Hill here, I can't help to notice the massive generational divide on how particularly Republicans in Congress think about issues like providing opportunity for young men to work in manufacturing jobs, reshoring, right, making our industrial base something that not only guarantees the national security of the United States, but also provides national flourishing in the form of good-paying jobs where people can actually support a family.

Can I tell you something crazy about the generational divide? I know so many young people just starting on their careers who say it's rough out there. And the older people, even millennials, don't understand how hard it is out there. And one, there's a scholar I think named Daniel Rosado who put out an article in City Journal about six months ago that made a shocking finding. AI resume sorters. show a decided bias for female applicants. They ran a study where they had an assortment of resumes,

some with male names and some with female names, and they made the qualifications such that they should have favored men and women equally. But something about what's going on in the black box of these AI job seeker programs is consistently favoring women over men. And then that was just with female names, like Brenda versus Carl. Then he did it with explicitly saying, this is a female resume, this is a male resume,

and the difference got bigger. The female advantage got even larger. So we don't know what it is in the black box that is making it favor women over men, but it is happening. And a majority of firms, and probably an overwhelming majority of firms now, use some form of AI in their HR

when they are hiring for jobs. So something that's become really important to the hiring process at a lot of companies is clearly, massively, and for reasons we don't understand, biased against men. So if you are a young man finding it impossible to get your foot in the door, even after you've gotten a degree in some STEM field or, you've done all the right things and you can't get a job, if you look at that study and worry that the system is stacked against you, I think you have every right to feel a group. by that. Well, and it, I mean, I didn't know that and it makes you really worried about what type of legal remedy there could be in the case where someone is discriminated against by AI. Yeah. Obviously, they're men, so no one's going to care. But if someone's discriminated against AI by AI, is that open AI's problem? Is that the employer's problem? Whose problem is it? Yes, we'll find out. It just goes to the nether. But the generational divide that you just tapped into,

It's apparent in Congress younger politicians particularly you know you think of J.D. Vance as VP now was the same way in the Senate. Josh Hawley, et cetera. They've they've really put a premium on trying to bring manufacturing and good blue collar jobs back to the United States of America. Sadly, Congress is an old folks home. Congress is full of octogenarian. holding on for dear life. And it just so happens, shockingly, that whether these people are Democrat or Republicans, they don't quite get the need to bring back manufacturing to the United States.

Sometimes they understand the national security part of it. But when you start talking about human flourishing, national flourishing, family flourishing, it seems that they check out when that topic of conversation is brought up. why are these people so old and why do they not know what time it is? I know. I think every day how can I make these people understand? What can I say that we'll shake them up?

And I don't know, short of some kind of neurological surgery, I don't think it can be done. I'm really frustrated by boomer leadership. But at this point, I have stopped worrying about the boomers. I think they are beyond saving. The people who don't know what time it is, who are unable to see the problems and what we need to do about them, I don't know that there's any hope for them. So I think the thing I focus on doing is making sure the generation that's going to succeed them when they finally, at long last exit the stage, is as well equipped as possible. The boomers will not last forever. They will be gone someday in our lifetime.

And by exit the stage, we mean retire. We wish you well, Mitch McConnell. That's right. Yeah. No, we're not wishing. You know, like four medical emergencies later, somebody finally figures out it might be a good idea to retire. But the other thing, too, is that like, boomer men seem to be a particularly weak kind of man.

I don't want to speak ill on boomers alive or dead. But it seems like the boomers. Umers throughout every stage of those generate of their development from the 60s, 70s, the 80s, they rolled over to the demands of liberalism or of the great feminization. I mean, how much of this is a problem with weak men? And by weak men, I don't mean men cannot compete with women. I mean men who said yes to all of this when they should have said no. you could be kind to them and say that it was some form of chivalry and I certainly think there are feminists who took advantage of that and because that's not an entirely bad instinct for men to have right when when a woman asks something from man for his first impulse to be yeah okay let's do it that's not a bad thing but the part of that dynamic that really bothers me is that so

in so many cases, when the old boomer men gave into the feminist demands, they were not themselves the ones paying the price. They were keeping their own plum positions. You know, the boomer CEO or the boomer VP is not giving up his job to meet his company's diversity target for hiring more women. The people at whose expense that's being done is the younger generation. So they were perfectly happy to sell out younger generations of men in order to accede to these feminist demands when it cost them nothing.

And that to me is always the thing that bothers me the most about the boomers. Bothers me so much that I wrote a whole book about it is that they tend to do these horrible things at no cost to themselves and then poses great morally righteous heroes. I think if you're not the one bearing the cost, you don't get to, you know, stand up and plume yourself on what a great thing you've done. So in sum, because we're coming to the end here, the great feminization is happening. In many cases, it's already happened. There are things that you can do to stem the tide or stem the effects.

Reversal seems unlikely. Even if you got rid of all the anti-discrimination laws, we're kind of in this. position where a majority of psychologists are already women, an increasing number of lawyers are already women, increasing number of credentialed individuals in our society are women. That's going to have an impact. One, already has had an impact on these institutions, and two, will continue to have an impact on those institutions. So with that, where are we heading?

Mm-hmm. I actually think that great feminization is a problem that will recede on its own. There is a reason why past civilizations have not faced this problem. It's because there are a lot of gravitational forces pulling against it. It is unnatural or uncommon for women to be so well represented in the institutions of the workforce because in every other previous society they've had obligations at home in the family to deal with. So it is only by massively incentivizing women to enter people. paid work that we have been able to create the situation where they are more than half of

young associates at law firms. But if we take those thumbs off the scale, I think that great feminization will recede. Will women still earn a majority of bachelor's degrees? Probably. Will women still be a majority of veterinarians? Probably. And that's a phasing out over a period of decades, right? Sure.

And a lot of these things are leading indicators and lagging indicators. But will women be as well represented in corporate America if it is no longer possible to sue your company for not hiring or promoting enough women as it is today? I don't know. I don't think they will be. We already see a majority of, you know, female lawyers and doctors shifting to part-time work midway through their career because if they don't do that, then they won't have children. and a lot of people really want to have children because they're great. So we have, I am open to many positions on the work-life balance question. What is the best way to balance having kids and having women in the workplace? I think there are a lot of answers to that question, a lot of ways to sort of balance those competing interests. That's fine to have some diversity of opinion there, but you're never going to eradicate

that difficulty. It's never going to be as easy for a woman as for a man to reach the heights of a profession without some kind of sacrifice on the childbearing front. So as long as most women want children, which they do, as long as most women have children, which at this point they still do, they will naturally recede from the professional sphere in order to attend to that equal. important business. So when people, you know, assuming I convince someone that the great feminization is the cause of wokeness and is therefore a problem that we need to address, I don't think we need to run around banning women from this or that institution. I don't think we need, I don't think that's necessary. It is a problem that has always in the past taken care of

itself just by letting people make their own choices and follow their own instincts and their own inclinations. The human species is just formed in such a way that letting people do what they want causes this problem to take care of itself. And I'm confident that's what would occur in America if we stopped deliberately manipulating gender relations in the toxic ways we've been doing so far. Helen Andrews, thank you for coming on the Signal Sitdown. Thanks for having you. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown. Before you go, be sure to hit like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review. We not only love your feedback, but it really does help the show.

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