TRIGGERnometry - The Problem With Feminising Society - Helen Andrews

00:00:00.000 The channeling of so many women of childbearing age into the workforce has had two really big 0.99

00:00:11.540 potentially civilization-ending consequences. One is the one I've been talking about, which is the

00:00:16.460 feminization of institutions. The other is declining birth rates. That too can cause the

00:00:22.080 end of your civilization. I don't think wokeness is an ideology. If it's an ideology, the way we

00:00:28.520 get rid of it is by having better arguments. But if wokeness is an inevitable result of demographic

00:00:34.260 feminization, then we really can't trust that wokeness is over. 0.87

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00:01:45.320 Helen, welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:46.980 Thanks for having me.

00:01:47.940 It's great to have you on. You wrote an article based on a speech you gave at the NatCon conference,

00:01:52.720 which exploded the internet, I think it's fair to say, when super viral caused a lot of debate and

00:01:59.040 discussion. And it's basically, I mean, I'll let you say in your own words, but it's kind of a little

00:02:04.080 bit about how the fact that women now control or at least represent the majority of the employees at 1.00

00:02:10.820 many institutions is one of the reasons that society has gone the way it has. Is that fair?

00:02:15.540 I think that's fair to say. Some people have reacted to the piece by, you know, acting as if

00:02:22.240 I'm saying women cause all the problems in the world. I'm definitely not saying that, but I am 1.00

00:02:26.400 saying that feminization has caused one specific particular problem, and that is wokeness. Like a 0.94

00:02:31.680 lot of people, I was baffled by the woke phenomenon. Why did everyone seemingly go crazy all at once in the

00:02:39.400 summer of 2020? It was inexplicable. It seemed to be mass hysteria, genuinely. And the more I thought

00:02:46.940 about what caused it, which is a very important question, because if we know what causes it, we

00:02:53.700 know how to prevent it from happening in the future. I read an article that someone else wrote that put

00:02:58.780 forward a really simple, elegant thesis, which is that wokeness is simply feminine patterns of behavior

00:03:04.760 applied to institutions where women had not been very well represented until recently.

00:03:10.400 Women tend to be more consensus-focused, consensus-oriented. Men, when they're approaching 0.98

00:03:17.380 a moral question, will ask, what are the facts? What are the rules? Whereas women will say, what are 1.00

00:03:22.640 the relationships at play here? How can we make everybody happy? How can we reach an outcome that

00:03:27.600 will satisfy all the parties, as opposed to the male perspective of how do we reach an outcome that is

00:03:32.060 just and according to the rules? That sounded a lot like wokeness to me. And the sort of piece that

00:03:41.280 made it all click into place for me was the coincidence of timing. It is the case, just we can

00:03:47.140 all agree, as a matter of fact, that a lot of institutions that went woke or were affected by

00:03:52.860 wokeness became demographically female in the last five years. Law schools in America turned majority

00:04:00.640 female in 2016, and they've gotten a little bit more female every year since then. I think now it

00:04:05.540 stands at 55, 56 percent. The New York Times became majority female in its workforce in 2018, which is 0.79

00:04:13.580 maybe why it was so susceptible to the fads of wokeness and the internal policing and the slack

00:04:19.300 revolts that took place internally over there. Medical schools are now majority female. The white-collar

00:04:26.340 workforce overall. Employees in the United States with college degrees, a majority of them are women.

00:04:32.300 And managers, management positions in the U.S. workforce, 46 percent female, so almost majority 0.91

00:04:39.560 female. So the fact that all of these institutions tipped over to being majority female around the same

00:04:45.000 time that wokeness emerged seemed to me that couldn't possibly be a coincidence.

00:04:49.280 Mm-hmm. And there's so many questions within that. I guess the first stress test of this

00:04:57.040 argument would be, well, they were also very close to being majority female 10 years prior to that,

00:05:03.560 right? So does going from 48 to 52 percent, is that really such a major shift that it would cause

00:05:11.280 something as dramatic as that? Well, you'd be surprised. I thought that the higher education

00:05:16.060 workforce professors in the United States would have gone female ages and ages ago, but it actually 1.00

00:05:21.940 only took female in 2023. So we think of feminization as something that happened a long time ago, but it

00:05:28.440 really does take a certain amount of time for time to pass and older generations to retire. But I think

00:05:36.100 the reason why attaining a critical mass of women has such a dramatic effect is that we're not talking

00:05:45.460 about individual differences, differences between individual men and individual women, but differences

00:05:52.500 in group dynamics. For example, you might be able to say from the perspective of psychology as a discipline

00:06:01.280 that women tend to be more emotional than men and men tend to be more rational or any kind of 0.98

00:06:07.380 generalization about men and women might have a certain amount of empirical support based on surveys.

00:06:12.440 But at the end of the day, those differences are not massive, right? Like female support for free 1.00

00:06:19.340 speech is greater or is less than male by double digits, but not, you know, it's not like night and

00:06:26.100 day. But when it comes to group dynamics, how does an organization function? How does an institution

00:06:32.560 deal with conflict? When you're talking about those kinds of things, those tend to be more binary.

00:06:37.560 Like either you solve your conflicts within an organization in a masculine way or in a feminine way.

00:06:42.540 Either open conflict is something that your institution will tolerate or it's not. So that's the kind of

00:06:47.860 thing where once you get a critical mass, you really kind of have to pick which one you're going to do.

00:06:52.200 Well, you mentioned consensus and sort of empathy and including all perspectives. That really isn't what

00:06:58.880 happened with wokeness, though, is it? Because it was more like we've come to a new consensus and anybody

00:07:04.040 doesn't agree is going to get killed, basically. Is that really I mean, that might be the way women 1.00

00:07:08.760 deal with this on a group basis. I don't know. You tell me. No, it's it's it's hard to verbalize

00:07:14.380 some of these differences because you you know, it might be a convenient shorthand to say men are

00:07:20.480 more comfortable with conflict than women. I think that that makes a lot of sense. Right. But 1.00

00:07:24.620 a famous psychology study, very often, if you're studying gender differences, you'll and you're a

00:07:31.380 psychologist, the way you'll do your studies, you'll just go to a playground and watch the kids

00:07:35.580 playing and observe and count up how many times somebody hits somebody else or something like that.

00:07:41.100 And there was an experiment of that type done, I believe, in Scandinavia, and it had a really funny

00:07:46.120 outcome. They the psychologists observed the kids playing and counted up how many fights they had.

00:07:53.800 And they said, OK, we observe that the men fight a lot more than the girls. But then as a supplement,

00:08:00.240 they decided to confirm their observations by talking to the kids and saying, how many fights

00:08:04.800 did you have today, Billy, or how many fights did you have today, Sally? And it was their discrepancy

00:08:09.900 was huge. They found that the girls reported having just as many fights as the men. The level of

00:08:19.420 conflict, male and female, on that schoolyard was exactly the same. But their observations had failed

00:08:26.900 to record any of the female conflicts. Because when they asked the girls, oh, you had a fight 1.00

00:08:32.040 today. What did that entail? It was things like Megan said she was going to tell everybody they

00:08:36.500 couldn't be my friend anymore. Which is where words of violence comes from. I imagine you're right.

00:08:40.800 That's right. That's right. And one of the most consistent psychological differences between men

00:08:46.360 and women is women have a strong impulse of caring. Which is exactly, I mean, I'm not somebody who looks 0.99

00:08:54.220 to evolutionary biology for the solutions to all human phenomena. But this particular one does seem

00:08:59.360 glaringly Darwinian, right? That women see helpless things and they want to take care of them. That is 0.99

00:09:04.060 definitely something that Darwin would find a pretty easy explanation for. But that's also something

00:09:08.500 that wokeness can easily weaponize. It means that if you can frame your political issue as a way of 1.00

00:09:16.780 caring for some helpless class, then you're golden, right? Minorities are babies. That's right. 1.00

00:09:24.700 And but that is that is precisely what's going on at a deeper level. And that's why it's been so

00:09:30.200 effective. And Helen, your article, and I encourage everyone to read it, it's fascinating whether you

00:09:35.020 agree or disagree with it. But you cited one particular case, which is the former president

00:09:40.500 of Harvard. So let's talk about that, because you use it as an as the main example for the thrust of

00:09:45.920 your argument. That's right. This was back in 2005. This is before anybody had ever heard of wokeness.

00:09:51.840 Now, I don't know if your listeners in the UK will be familiar with Larry Summers, but he was at that

00:09:58.420 time, probably one of the 10 most powerful people in the country. He was not just the president of

00:10:04.020 Harvard. He had also been in Bill Clinton's cabinet. He had been at the World Bank. He was an

00:10:09.000 academically eminent economist, very well connected in the Democratic Party, just a really powerful

00:10:14.540 guy. He was invited to give a speech at a conference on female underrepresentation in science

00:10:20.840 and math. And he decided to deliver his remarks off the cuff and to be really. And actually, if you know

00:10:27.500 anything about Larry Summers, he has a reputation for being a really blunt guy. He's somebody who does

00:10:32.380 not suffer fools gladly. So when you're getting the blunt Larry Summers, you're really getting

00:10:36.500 something quite direct. But the talk was supposed to be off the record. And that's important to

00:10:41.020 emphasize that the women who listened to what he said and took it to a reporter were violating the

00:10:45.960 rules that they had undertaken to follow when they attended. Anyway, he said that female 1.00

00:10:50.680 underrepresentation in the hard sciences was attributable to a lot of different factors, not

00:10:55.520 necessarily just prejudice or bias or the patriarchy not thinking ladies can be scientists. There is a

00:11:02.960 difference of aptitude at the very, very, very high ends. If you're talking about people who are going

00:11:06.900 to be tenured at MIT, that's way out at the end of the bell curve. And there tend to be more men out there

00:11:12.500 than women. And also differences in taste. That is, women tend to gravitate towards professions and fields where 0.99

00:11:19.880 they get to deal with people as opposed to something really cold and abstract like physics. Not to say that

00:11:24.440 no women do, but that is the tendency. So women who are way out there at that end of the bell curve 1.00

00:11:29.640 and have the aptitude for a career in hard science would maybe gravitate to something like medicine

00:11:34.300 as opposed to something like physics. So Larry Summers said all this, and there were a bunch of

00:11:39.300 lady scientists in the audience who said, how dare you? And they gave quotes to a reporter something 1.00

00:11:44.640 like, I felt like I was going to throw up or I thought I was going to black out. And it became a huge

00:11:50.360 controversy. And there were a lot of other controversies during Larry Summers' tenure as president of

00:11:57.380 Harvard. So that was not the only thing that brought him down, but it was definitely at the very top of the

00:12:02.240 list. And about a year later, he resigned.

00:12:05.120 And what's really interesting is with that case, and now I don't doubt that it caused a massive stir when he went on

00:12:12.040 and basically went, I'm going to freestyle and deliver truth bombs to all of you. So here we are, enjoy it.

00:12:17.520 But he's also, if you get to be president of Harvard, you are going to make enemies aplenty.

00:12:23.440 In order to get to that position, you're going to have to fire people, antagonize people, because

00:12:27.960 that's just the nature of the job. So he would have had loads of enemies who were willing just to pounce

00:12:33.860 at that particular moment, surely.

00:12:35.380 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I'm trying to remember some of the other controversies that have attended Larry Summers'

00:12:42.760 career. And I believe one from his tenure at the World Bank was when he said, are we sure we want to

00:12:49.980 really, really enforce labor laws against having sweatshops in third world countries? Because isn't having sweatshops

00:12:56.500 good for them sometimes? I mean, it leads to economic development. He phrased it in a really blunt way.

00:13:02.520 I feel like this is a guy who has a history of putting his foot in his mouth in a way that I

00:13:06.220 frankly find really admirable. But certain people don't. So then has that been extrapolated right

00:13:14.180 the way through society, essentially, is your argument? That that was one of the first times

00:13:18.960 that a cancellation happened, that people heard somebody say something offensive, pitched a little

00:13:25.320 fit, and managed to rob this person of his job. And the particular aspect of it that seemed so full

00:13:31.220 foreboding looking back, is that there was no attempt to debate the issue rationally. There were plenty

00:13:37.260 of people, even people on the Harvard faculty, with eminent expertise in the relevant scientific fields,

00:13:44.780 willing to stand up and say everything Larry Summers said was perfectly within the scientific mainstream.

00:13:49.600 Greater male variability, that's, you know, everybody thinks that. So there were people willing to say

00:13:55.020 he's right on the facts. Criticize him all you want for his tone, but he was right on the facts.

00:14:00.060 And the women who went after his job were not willing to have that debate. They were not willing 0.99

00:14:06.060 to talk about it rationally. They just said, I'm offended. I felt like I was going to black out. He was

00:14:10.720 invalidating my career. This is everything I work for. Very much a feelings over facts kind of thing.

00:14:17.740 And so I don't mind if there are people who are feminists or who have different political views 1.00

00:14:22.860 to those that I have. But it's important that we be able to debate them, right? That we have

00:14:27.960 rational arguments. And this was one of the first instances where people just said, no, I'm not

00:14:32.740 going to, I'm not going to debate it. I'm just going to say I'm offended. And that's going to be

00:14:35.780 the end of the story. Because Jordan Peterson used to talk a lot about this, where he used to talk about

00:14:40.500 one of the ways that females try and destroy or attack other people isn't through the physical 1.00

00:14:48.900 realm. It's through reputation destruction. And this is essentially what you're talking about,

00:14:53.320 isn't it?

00:14:54.000 Yeah, absolutely.

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00:16:17.260 And one of the other things, I don't know if, I hope I'm not revealing anything that I shouldn't in

00:16:22.300 terms of, because I can't remember if this is something I heard Jordan say publicly or privately,

00:16:27.160 but I don't think you'd mind me sharing this. I mean, one of the things she talked to me about

00:16:31.220 was the fact that the female mind sort of has three categories for other human beings. One of them is 1.00

00:16:39.980 baby, i.e. infant needs care. Another one is caregiver, i.e. spouse, you know, mother-in-law,

00:16:47.400 et cetera. And then it sort of kind of makes sense to treat everybody else as a potential enemy just

00:16:53.120 from a safety perspective. Well, you don't know them, so you might as well make sure that you are

00:16:57.760 extra careful. And what you do with the enemy, if you establish that they're the enemy, is you get

00:17:02.840 away, and if you can't, you destroy them somehow, right? And if we accept your thesis, which is

00:17:10.080 women and minorities fit the infant category, then anyone who appears to in any way be not on board

00:17:19.120 with eternal empowerment, let's call it that, they would automatically go in the enemy box.

00:17:25.280 And then what happens is what happens to Larry. Yeah, I like Jordan Peterson a lot. I think he's

00:17:32.580 a very wise person. But to be honest, this sort of mythology of gender differences was never something

00:17:40.800 that interested me. It was never a topic that I ever anticipated I would be writing about. It's just

00:17:47.140 not my cup of tea. Because it seems like a kind of debate that goes in circles and has gone in circles

00:17:53.080 for centuries. There have been battles between the male and the female since the dawn of time,

00:17:59.080 since before the dawn of time. The primates, there are battles between men and women. It's definitely 0.99

00:18:04.280 a topic of debate that has been returned to and recycled over the centuries. The reason why this

00:18:11.240 feminization thesis kind of sparked my interest in a way that gender dynamics in general never really did

00:18:17.200 is that it is something unprecedented. It is that miraculous thing, something in the gender wars 1.00

00:18:23.160 that is truly new. We have never, no civilization on the planet has ever had a situation where they

00:18:31.340 can look forward to a day when a majority of judges are going to be female. Or they can anticipate a day 0.99

00:18:37.320 not too long from now when the majority of legislators in their parliament are going to be female. When they 0.99

00:18:42.320 have female police chiefs in their largest cities. Or, you know, the legal profession in general is on its way 1.00

00:18:49.840 to being majority female. That is something unprecedented. So it's really not that surprising 0.90

00:18:55.520 and shouldn't really be that controversial to say that something no civilization in human history has

00:19:01.060 ever faced is posing new problems that we haven't seen before. And how do you frame this in your mind?

00:19:07.720 Are you saying, well, look, we're rebalancing society. And as a result of this, we will have

00:19:16.020 institutions and discourse and a way of doing politics and a way of doing many things that is

00:19:23.700 more female. And, you know, we're rebalancing society and that's great. Or that, that like any 0.96

00:19:30.060 change that causes problems, but it also brings benefits. Or is your contention that the increasing

00:19:37.540 feminization of institutions is in and of itself a negative because that way of doing things is less

00:19:45.700 suited to the purpose of those institutions? Because those are very different perspectives.

00:19:50.020 It's all about the purpose of the institution. So you have to judge it on a case-by-case basis.

00:19:55.200 The most feminized profession in America today is veterinary medicine. All of the veterinarians in 1.00

00:20:02.580 America are ladies now. I don't know why that happened, but 80% of students at veterinary schools 1.00

00:20:07.860 are women now. It's possible that that has had catastrophic effects that I'm not aware of,

00:20:13.300 but I'm pretty comfortable with that. I don't think that's going to lead to the end of civilization

00:20:17.700 because there's nothing about feminine modes of interaction that is contrary to the essence 0.90

00:20:21.540 of veterinary medicine. However, I think if you're a university, that might be one where if you have

00:20:29.380 modes of group interaction that are oriented towards conformity and consensus, that's not compatible

00:20:36.020 with what a university is supposed to do. A university is supposed to be a safe place for

00:20:40.260 prickly, eccentric characters who believe things that nobody else believes because they've studied

00:20:44.580 an issue really hard and they're, you know, disagreeable. That's the university should be a

00:20:48.500 place for them. And if you're now running your English department in a way that you no longer tolerate

00:20:54.180 characters of that description, that seems like a problem. In the case of business, that's one

00:21:00.660 where I can imagine some businesses where feminine modes of interaction would be an advantage and 1.00

00:21:06.900 would lead your business to flourish. I can imagine other businesses where the HR-ification of the

00:21:11.540 workplace is a major roadblock and makes it really hard for your business to do the things it was

00:21:16.820 designed to do. So in my perfect world, there would be room for both. We would, you know, it's a big

00:21:23.060 world out there. Everybody can find the kind of workplace that is most compatible with their own

00:21:26.900 preferences. The problem is that in the United States right now, there are a lot of legal thumbs

00:21:34.820 on the scale that tend to really, really empower the HR lady in your office and give her a veto power 1.00

00:21:43.220 of everything that anybody does who works at your company. And that has led to a feminization of

00:21:51.460 every workplace, every large institution in America. So I think that is a thumb on the scale

00:22:00.820 that makes it hard for institutions that might be more suited to masculine modes of interaction to 0.99

00:22:06.660 pursue them. So yeah, and it has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. There are examples of

00:22:12.900 feminization that are fine. There are examples of feminization that are advantageous. So you just have

00:22:18.580 to judge it against whether or not it serves the purpose of the institution, and also whether or

00:22:24.100 not that feminization was naturally occurring, or whether it was just the HR lady coming in and 0.87

00:22:29.700 ruining things for everybody. Well, in terms of the HR lady thing, I totally get what you're saying

00:22:35.540 on the one hand. I also think, look, I'm 42 years old. Within my lifetime, there would have been

00:22:42.740 male bosses who would go around slapping their secretaries on the ass. And that was the culture 1.00

00:22:48.820 of, and that business, you know, you might say, well, you know, that business made more money,

00:22:52.820 and it was much more concerned about, you know, profits, and they didn't care about, you know,

00:22:57.220 somebody had the wrong opinion, and people weren't getting canceled. But maybe that was a good thing to

00:23:02.980 address? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think sexual harassment is very bad. It's good that we have

00:23:07.860 laws against us. But I think some of the reaction to the article I wrote that was negative came from

00:23:16.500 people who just really don't know what the law mandates today. People out there who read it did

00:23:22.740 not believe me when I said that you can be sued for not hiring enough women at your company and for not 0.98

00:23:29.780 promoting enough women at your company. But that is truly the case. One of the most famous gender

00:23:37.300 discrimination lawsuits in American history was the Sears case, which was launched by the Equal

00:23:44.420 Employment Opportunity Commission in 1980 against Sears, the big retailer. Specifically, they allege

00:23:50.740 that Sears was channeling women into non-commissioned sales positions and away from the commissioned

00:23:57.460 sales positions, which tended to be more irregularly remunerated because it's a commission sales

00:24:03.220 position. So you had good months and bad months, but you generally got higher pay.

00:24:09.460 Sears responded to this lawsuit by saying, look, the statistical disparity is there. You're right.

00:24:16.420 Our female employees tend to prefer lower paying but more stable remuneration packages. 1.00

00:24:24.180 We've tried to get them interested in this one and they just won't do it. But the EEOC said, no,

00:24:28.580 it's only because you are biased against women that you have the statistical disparity. And the thing

00:24:34.820 that makes the Sears case so famous in the annals of these lawsuits is that their case was entirely

00:24:41.220 statistical, purely statistical. They did not have a single woman who claimed to have been

00:24:48.420 discriminated against at Sears. All the women that Sears called said, we love it. We love this company.

00:24:54.100 They're really great. They're a great place for a woman to work. Now, eventually, after six years, 1.00

00:24:59.300 a judge ruled in Sears's favor. So Sears won that case. The EEOC did not prevail in their purely

00:25:05.540 statistical case. But it took Sears a lot of money to defend against that lawsuit. It did drag on for

00:25:12.420 six years. It was not like they said to them on day one, if you don't have a client, you don't have a

00:25:16.820 case. And the way that the law resolved this question of whether you could have a purely

00:25:24.020 statistical case was to say it can't be just statistics. You do need somebody who claims to

00:25:28.180 have been discriminated against, but it can be primarily statistical. So it is simply true that

00:25:34.660 if your company has men overrepresented in management or in employees overall, that can be the basis for

00:25:41.620 some woman to come along and file a lawsuit against you. And that has occurred in many, 1.00

00:25:46.340 many businesses. And it usually doesn't make the headlines. So people don't really know that that's

00:25:50.180 what the law says. But Wall Street firms have been hit with things like this because they don't have

00:25:54.340 enough female traders. It's just if you're a business owner, you have to be aware of this. 1.00

00:25:59.780 And so I think it is true. It is just a fact as a matter of a fact about the world that women are 1.00

00:26:07.940 hired and promoted more than they would be in a pure meritocracy because of laws like that.

00:26:14.340 Because it always interested me with the whole kind of woke thing and when we went peak nonsense,

00:26:20.100 that more people within the halls of power, wherever that may be, whether it be politics,

00:26:25.700 business or wherever else, go, no, you're not going to have a glorified tantrum. And I always saw

00:26:32.100 it as a courage deficit, if I'm being honest. But now that you've explained there's a legal element to it,

00:26:37.940 it goes some way to explaining part of the problem.

00:26:40.900 Well, think about James Daymore, the guy at Google who wrote his memo saying basically the

00:26:45.940 same Larry Summers argument all over again. The reason why Google fired him was not just

00:26:50.100 because they had a staff revolt. It was because it made them vulnerable to a lawsuit. If you have

00:26:55.220 somebody who's on the record saying, I think it's possible that women are underrepresented at the

00:27:00.180 extremes of aptitude, then somebody who files a lawsuit can say he doesn't think women can be 1.00

00:27:05.860 capable. And that's why he didn't promote me or hire me or give me opportunities at work.

00:27:10.500 So, yeah, that is not the only case where that has happened, that somebody has

00:27:15.860 made a statement about gender differences that led their institution to fire them because they

00:27:21.300 were worried about legal liability. 0.66

00:27:22.020 But it seems to me so ridiculous because it's a clear misrepresentation of the argument.

00:27:27.940 Even when I used to teach, I could show that to my 14 or 15 year olds and go,

00:27:34.900 oh, why does that argument not scan? And they'd be able to explain it. So why can't other people?

00:27:40.500 I don't know what to tell you. The trouble is that the law is just the simple 1964 civil

00:27:47.380 rights law. You can't discriminate against somebody on the basis of sex. And that sounds

00:27:52.100 really great. I mean, you know, the same way that the ERA sounded really great. Equal rights amendment

00:27:56.500 was against equal rights. But judges have extrapolated from that really simple statement,

00:28:02.420 all kinds of stuff. And it has created an atmosphere of uncertainty. Right. So and that

00:28:08.660 that's the thing that is most oppressive, that feels most totalitarian on a day to day basis.

00:28:14.820 You really never know whether some behavior or some statement is against the law or not,

00:28:22.340 because a lot of stuff falls into the gray area of, well, it's not technically illegal,

00:28:27.060 but if somebody sued our company, they might be able to cite that as evidence of an atmosphere of

00:28:33.300 bias. And that's just not the way law is supposed to work. Because what it seems to be is, look, 0.88

00:28:39.700 let's be honest about this. Until relatively recently, women had a pretty tough time of it. 1.00

00:28:44.980 It wasn't, you know, it wasn't easy to be a woman, particularly not in the workplace. You were

00:28:50.900 likely to be discriminated against. There's case after case, story after story. What it seems to me

00:28:56.740 is that there has been an overcorrection by well-meaning people wanting to implement laws in order to

00:29:02.980 protect women. And it's kind of metastasized into something else.

00:29:06.980 And we have to keep in mind, it's not just about the people who work at an institution. If you're

00:29:13.460 talking about something like the legal system, I want female lawyers to be happy and have a good 1.00

00:29:18.740 time. But that is not my top priority. My top priority is that we have a good legal system

00:29:22.660 that's functioning and leads to a just and fair society. And we had increasing female representation 1.00

00:29:31.220 in the legal system seems to have been accompanied by a lot more wokeness, which I think is more

00:29:37.940 damaging in lawyers than it is in almost anywhere else. Because the law is the one field where you

00:29:43.700 really want people to be as literal minded as possible, as devoted to the rules as possible,

00:29:49.780 not fudging things so that everybody's happy, really sticking to the letter of the law.

00:29:55.460 And so if the law is corrupted, that's something that I'm very, very worried about. And we saw

00:30:01.140 we got a glimpse of what a maximally feminized legal system might look like here in the United 0.99

00:30:07.620 States in our Title IX campus courts for sexual assault. I don't know how it's done in the UK,

00:30:15.300 but here in the US in 2011, the Obama administration mandated that universities in the United States

00:30:24.580 adopt certain rules for adjudicating allegations of sexual assault on campus.

00:30:29.620 Things like you had to use a preponderance of evidence standard. So no more proving things

00:30:35.700 beyond a reasonable doubt. Men who were accused were no longer allowed to confront their accusers

00:30:43.220 because that might be traumatizing. It was just basically the wish list that we saw during the Me

00:30:48.100 Too era, which, you know, a lot of people were sympathetic to because nobody wants, you know, 0.98

00:30:53.220 sexual abuse or sexual assault or anything like that. But on the other hand, you also want these

00:30:57.620 legal protections and due process protections that have evolved over centuries for very good reasons.

00:31:03.220 And what we saw in the Title IX campus courts for sexual assault and what we saw during the Me Too

00:31:08.100 movement was a willingness to throw out those due process protections because of a political commitment

00:31:16.580 to feminist values. And so I don't want to see that attitude to the law expand to other fields,

00:31:23.460 because in the particular case of sexual assault and Me Too, it worked out really, really badly.

00:31:27.620 A lot of people were unfairly accused and had their lives ruined, and it was not a good system.

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00:33:31.780 I completely agree with you. I mean, and there's many cases. Let's not get into that.

00:33:36.020 But you said campus courts. And as somebody who was brought up, we were both brought up in the UK,

00:33:41.540 and we went to university in the UK, etc. I've never heard of a campus court. That immediately

00:33:47.220 rings alarm bells. Why is there a campus court? What is this? That's right. You would think

00:33:51.460 women who had some bad sexual experience, like a hookup that went wrong or anything like that, 0.95

00:33:58.660 could then go to their university and say, you know, that guy raped me or whatever. And then the 0.79

00:34:05.300 school would be in charge of discipline or adjudicating that case. Now, you or I might think

00:34:12.500 that if you've been the victim of a serious assault, you would go to the police. And that,

00:34:16.660 I think, is what a lot of people recommend is a better system. But the school was required to

00:34:24.180 have its own little campus courts for deciding whether or not a particular hookup had met the

00:34:29.460 standard for assault. And yeah, it was a really bad system. And a lot of people had their lives ruined.

00:34:36.100 Well, coming back a little bit to your point about women being promoted, partly because there's a fear

00:34:43.860 of not having enough women in your company or institution. Do you not think that this ultimately

00:34:50.100 goes back to the very core of the main idea that you must never utter out loud in public now and

00:34:57.860 pretty much anywhere in the Western world is that there are group differences between people,

00:35:02.180 not just men and women, but generally that maybe some groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in

00:35:08.740 certain fields because of cultural differences or maybe, God forbid, genetic differences or other

00:35:14.660 things. Thomas Sowell has a great bit in his last book about how almost every brewery in the world,

00:35:21.940 including Tsingtao, the Chinese brewery, was founded by Germans, right? He breaks down that,

00:35:28.580 you know, how in almost every great American, Latinos are more overrepresented in baseball,

00:35:33.380 white people are overrepresented in hockey, black people are overrepresented in NBA. Like,

00:35:39.460 it's actually the standard human thing that different people have different aptitudes for

00:35:43.540 different things. But if you live in a society whose central idea is that all men are created

00:35:48.740 the same, not equal, but the same, which is what we now believe, then all of this stuff follows,

00:35:54.500 surely. Yeah. I think a lot of the research into group differences is really valuable. But one

00:36:02.900 question that they don't have an answer to, and that no one has an answer to, is one that I think

00:36:08.100 we're on the cusp of finding out. And that is, how big of an effect have affirmative action programs

00:36:15.220 had? When the SFFA group filed its lawsuit against Harvard and eventually prevailed at the Supreme Court

00:36:24.820 and got their Supreme Court ruling saying that Harvard may no longer use race as a factor in college

00:36:30.900 admissions. When that lawsuit was ongoing, this is amazing, but nobody had an answer to the question of,

00:36:37.620 if you get rid of racial preferences at Harvard, will the black proportion of the freshman class 0.68

00:36:43.540 go from 14% to 10% or will it go from 14% to 2%? I mean, you can make rough estimates of this based on

00:36:52.180 things like test scores and grades, but people genuinely didn't know. And we're sort of seeing

00:36:58.900 that play out now on various college campuses what the effects will be. But it was amazing to think

00:37:03.540 that they got rid of affirmative action in university admissions without knowing what the outcome would

00:37:07.940 be. When it comes to things like the workforce, these programs for women and for other groups have

00:37:15.780 been in place for so long now, for decades really, that just like with the SFFA case, nobody knows what

00:37:24.100 would happen if you got rid of them. President Trump has gotten rid of a lot of DEI programs

00:37:31.140 since the start of the year, since the start of term two. And we are just going to have to wait and see

00:37:38.340 what effect that will have on the U.S. workforce. It is way too early to tell, but there have been

00:37:45.860 news stories in places like the Associated Press showing that I think the latest count is 350,000

00:37:52.980 black women have become unemployed or left the workforce since the start of the year, which is

00:37:57.620 a pretty big number. And black unemployment is going up now, even though white unemployment is

00:38:04.580 stable or down. So those two are diverging in a way that they usually don't. Now, it is way too early

00:38:11.460 to attribute either of those developments to the end of DEI. It is definitely way too early to say

00:38:17.380 anything like that or to even come to any conclusions at all. But these affirmative action

00:38:24.100 programs have been around for so long that nobody really knows what would happen if you got rid of

00:38:27.300 them. So we don't really know what Trump's anti-DEI steps, what effect that will have on the American

00:38:33.700 workforce. Now, to bring it back to feminization, it is my prediction that if you got rid of these 1.00

00:38:40.980 thumbs on the scale, that the problem of the great feminization would take care of itself. 0.96

00:38:47.060 That the demographics of a lot of these institutions would change in a way that

00:38:53.460 basically the problem would solve itself. Now, there are some people who disagree,

00:38:56.980 some people who think the great feminization is here to stay. I'm willing to kind of see what

00:39:03.860 happens. I think there are probably some forms of the great feminization that are here to stay.

00:39:07.780 Uh, women earn more bachelor's degrees than men. There are more female undergraduates than male. 0.80

00:39:14.420 Uh, but that's been the case since the 1980s. I think the female advantage in post-secondary 1.00

00:39:21.540 education, that's probably pretty resilient. I would expect that to continue to be the case.

00:39:26.660 In fact, at a lot of universities, they have affirmative action for men because they don't 0.82

00:39:29.860 get enough male applicants and they know if they have a 70% female campus, nobody's going to want to go 1.00

00:39:33.620 there. Um, so at the undergraduate level, it's men who enjoy affirmative action.

00:39:38.180 But how would that work out in the workforce? Uh, I would anticipate that, um, uh, a lot of the

00:39:44.340 feminization that we see now would naturally recede. But, uh, as I've said, nobody really knows.

00:39:51.540 And Helen, how much of this is to do with young women not having kids and therefore their empathy

00:40:02.180 has to go somewhere? It's a controversial question because we know that women, as they have kids, 1.00

00:40:08.500 they become more conservative, their priorities change, they focus more on family than they do on

00:40:13.780 social issues. I have certainly met liberal women who, whom I would be bold, be so bold as to 0.99

00:40:22.820 psychoanalyze that that is exactly what is going on. Um, but I think the great feminization, the 0.89

00:40:30.260 channeling of so many women of childbearing age into the workforce has had two really big, 1.00

00:40:38.740 potentially civilization-ending consequences. One is the one I've been talking about, which is the

00:40:43.780 feminization of institutions that makes them no longer function well. The other is declining

00:40:50.100 birth rates, that if you have too many women too dedicated to their careers or engaged in other

00:40:55.380 activities and so that they're not having kids, that too can cause the end of your civilization.

00:41:01.780 So it, it's, you know, but I feel like there are a lot of people, uh, working on the birth rate stuff.

00:41:07.460 Um, but I, it's not a coincidence, I guess is what I'm trying to say, that these two problems have

00:41:11.380 arisen at the same time because they are both connected to the same phenomenon. It is a phenomenon

00:41:16.900 that, like I said before, is one that no human civilization in history has ever faced. So it's not

00:41:23.140 surprising that it would yield, um, huge unprecedented problems. I think the falling birth rate is one of

00:41:28.180 them. Well, and also as well, you know, we have to look at universities when it comes to this because

00:41:34.100 there's a lot of women who go into university and men, and they effectively serve as indoctrination 1.00

00:41:40.820 camps. I have friends and I know people who went to Ivy League universities in this country,

00:41:46.340 and what they tell me about the first couple of weeks, I'm like, I'm going like, this isn't a place

00:41:51.700 of education. You know, you have to stand up and say how you've been oppressed. And that is one

00:41:57.380 very prestigious university in this country where everybody in a class stood up and had to identify

00:42:03.060 how they are oppressed and why it affected them. And you're going, what has this got to do with

00:42:07.940 the psychology? Oh, yeah, you don't have to tell me. The first really famous woke video of the girl

00:42:13.860 yelling at her college master in the courtyard because of the Halloween email, like the master's

00:42:18.980 wife had sent out an email saying, everybody, Halloween is coming up. Let's be chill about

00:42:23.380 cultural appropriation. If you see a white girl wearing a sari, don't freak out. And a bunch of 0.88

00:42:27.780 people said, that's really offensive. A bunch of people freaked out.

00:42:32.100 And it culminated in a screaming match because the master of the college told people to, you know,

00:42:37.140 come out and let's, let's talk, let's talk it over. And one girl just had a shrieking meltdown, 1.00

00:42:42.500 dropped a lot of F-bombs, which I think is not appropriate to do in that situation.

00:42:46.100 The exception is because other people have rights too, not just walk away, walk away,

00:42:50.660 walk away. He doesn't deserve to be listened to me. He doesn't deserve to be listened to me.

00:42:53.780 He doesn't deserve to be listened to me. He doesn't deserve to be listened to me.

00:42:55.860 I did not.

00:42:56.420 Stay quiet for all women's kids. Do you understand that? 1.00

00:43:00.740 As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students

00:43:06.420 that live in Sylman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against

00:43:11.700 your position as master. Do you understand that? No, I don't agree with that.

00:43:15.940 Then why the did you accept the position? Who the hired you? I have a different vision.

00:43:21.780 You should step down. If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down.

00:43:26.420 It is not about creating an intellectual space. It is not. Do you understand that? It's about creating

00:43:32.100 a home here. You are not doing that. You're supposed to be our advocate. You should be

00:43:39.060 if they've been last night when you hear her Franco say that she didn't know how to create a

00:43:42.740 safe space for her freshman in Sylman. How do you explain that? These freshmen coming and they

00:43:48.260 think this is what Yale is? Do you hear that? They're going to leave. They're going to transfer

00:43:53.940 because you are a poor student of the community. You should not sleep at night. We are disgusting.

00:44:03.540 But the reason why that video stuck in my mind was not just that it was one of the first

00:44:07.780 sort of inaugural salvos of the woke era, but because you could see my old college room in

00:44:12.660 the background. I was like, I walked across that courtyard. That's my courtyard. Stop

00:44:16.420 desecrating it. No, absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. But I also feel that, you know,

00:44:21.780 we talk about feminization. We really have to look at the universities, because if you pump this doctrine, 1.00

00:44:28.980 this ideology into people's heads and then they go out and then spread the ideology,

00:44:36.820 you have to take responsibility. We need to look at universities.

00:44:41.540 Helen, you're pulling faces. Destroy them with facts and logic in a more masculine way. 0.94

00:44:46.500 Don't care about consensus or his feelings.

00:44:47.860 Yeah, I feel that, you know, the reason why I disagree is that I don't think wokeness is an

00:44:55.700 ideology. And the reason why it's important to emphasize that is because if it's an ideology,

00:45:04.180 the way we get rid of it is by having better arguments. But if wokeness is an inevitable 0.85

00:45:09.700 result of demographic feminization, if any organization or institution that has a critical

00:45:14.660 mass of women is going to behave this way, no matter what their ideology is, if that's the case, 1.00

00:45:20.100 then we really can't trust that wokeness is over or will recede naturally or that better arguments

00:45:25.940 will win the day. And I see a lot of people now feel like, OK, the insanity of 2020 is over.

00:45:31.780 People are no longer getting canceled left and right. Maybe the vibe shift is here and wokeness is over.

00:45:37.780 And I think that is premature. I think it is going to be more resilient than that,

00:45:43.220 because it does. It is connected to this demographic feminization.

00:45:46.420 Well, very much on that. I mean, I nearly made the joke that, you know,

00:45:49.700 you're saying we shouldn't get rid of the ideology. We should just get rid of the women. 1.00

00:45:53.540 But I guess what I'm going to ask you is once you've got a situation where you've encouraged 0.96

00:46:02.180 so many women into the workplace, your argument is you've affirmative action them somewhat into the 0.99

00:46:08.500 workplace. We now live in a society where even as a two income couple, life is pretty hard,

00:46:14.580 actually, in a way that it just wasn't for your grandparents in this country.

00:46:20.580 Are you going to get the toothpaste back in the tube? Like, how do you how do you even do that?

00:46:24.660 Because as a young woman, you you you're not going to get married until your mid thirties, 0.74

00:46:31.460 possibly just because of the way the world is. You need to make a living. You need to have a career.

00:46:35.860 It's no longer as much of an option to to Matt to find a guy at 20, marry, be the homemaker and let

00:46:42.420 him because like that guy is going to have to earn a hell of a lot of money just for you to live

00:46:46.580 a lower class life. Forget about a middle class life. Right. The two income trap is a serious problem.

00:46:54.900 Yeah. And I think there are a lot of things unrelated to the gender question that we can do to address

00:47:01.380 that. I think that reducing immigration would actually go a really long way to solving the two 0.86

00:47:07.780 income trap and reducing some of those massive cost of living pressures that couples face. But I have

00:47:14.900 hope. I'm optimistic that the two income trap problem can be solved through appropriate policies

00:47:21.940 because there are just so many forces of gravity pulling against it. Even now when it's there are

00:47:29.780 so many pressures for women to stay in the workforce, even when they have kids, even even with all of

00:47:34.980 those things, most women still tell surveys that they prefer to work part time or to drop out of the 1.00

00:47:42.580 workforce for a few years while their kids are young. So that's what women still want. And the women 1.00

00:47:48.740 whose husbands do earn enough tend to do exactly that. Even really accomplished women, women with 1.00

00:47:55.860 law degrees or medical degrees, almost most of them go part time at some point in their careers when they

00:48:02.580 choose to have children. So there really are a lot of deeply seated human forces of gravity pulling in the

00:48:09.140 direction of the motive of a family that we've had for millennia. So the two income trap does make it

00:48:16.980 harder. But I think if we make it even just a little bit easier, people will gravitate to the older,

00:48:23.140 better model. That's really interesting. So all of the things we've talked about so far,

00:48:28.420 you're an expert in and we're not. The one area that you talked about that we sort of do know from

00:48:33.380 the inside out is media. And that's where I thought, with all possible respect, of course, that

00:48:39.140 there was the most controversial claims that you made, actually. Because one of the arguments you

00:48:44.340 made is, and you've kind of described it already in the course of this conversation, which is about

00:48:49.300 the fact that a more male institution is much more focused on the pursuit of truth, even if that means

00:48:55.380 there's conflict, people are offended and upset. And I go, well, look at the kind of world that we're in.

00:49:02.420 We're in new media, we're on YouTube, we're in podcasting. Almost all of the people who do that

00:49:07.220 are male. I go, I'm not certain that that has become an environment where the pursuit of truth

00:49:13.940 is the primary goal. It seems to me that the pursuit of clicks, the pursuit of controversy,

00:49:23.380 the pursuit of the fighting has become the primary goal. The pursuit of truth seems to me quite secondary.

00:49:31.220 So is it really true to say that, you know, the more masculinized institutions of media

00:49:37.380 are much more focused on truth than the more feminist version of it?

00:49:42.100 The news doesn't just tell you what's happening. It so often tells you what to think is happening.

00:49:47.220 And these days, the biggest red flag isn't what's said, it's what gets left out. That's why I use Ground

00:49:53.220 News. It's the only site and app that compares coverage from across the political spectrum

00:49:58.340 and highlights which stories are being ignored entirely. See for yourself at ground.news

00:50:03.620 slash trigonometry. The Blindspot feed is one of my favorite features. It surfaces around 20 stories

00:50:09.700 a day that are being overlooked by either the left or the right. It's a simple but powerful way to track

00:50:14.980 media bias in real time. Like this, NIH scientists recently published a declaration criticizing Trump's

00:50:21.700 cuts to public health research. That's a major move, and yet only two percent of the coverage came from

00:50:28.100 right-leaning outlets. A new study found that 2024 saw the most armed conflicts globally since 1946.

00:50:35.220 A staggering statistic. But you would have missed it if you'd only read left-wing news sources.

00:50:39.940 Ground News gives you the full picture. Headlines, ownership, bias ratings, and context. So you can

00:50:45.620 actually understand what's going on, not just react to what you're told. Head to ground.news

00:50:50.820 slash trigonometry for 40% off their unlimited advantage plan, the same one we use, and start

00:50:57.300 thinking for yourself. I think one of the best responses to the article that I read was by Megan

00:51:04.580 McArdle, who's a political journalist in Washington DC, who I've been reading for a long time. She's really,

00:51:09.140 really great, really sharp. But she reflected on the feminization thesis and thought, well, you know,

00:51:16.020 certainly there's clearly a lot of validity there. But the part that I liked was her anecdote of her

00:51:20.660 own career in media. She said, you know, that she's been to policy dinners in DC where journalists

00:51:28.820 and practitioners get together. And she's been to some all-female ones, deliberately all-female,

00:51:34.980 you know, to help the ladies advance their careers. And she says, the atmosphere is so different.

00:51:39.380 Because at those all-female dinners, when you ask somebody a question, you do that with the purpose 1.00

00:51:44.180 of getting an answer and hearing what it is. If you're at a mixed policy dinner where men are

00:51:48.820 present, you ask a question to prove that you're smarter than the person you're asking the question

00:51:52.660 of. And so it is clearly true that I do not mean to lionize or paint a rosy picture of masculine

00:52:00.260 modes of interaction. They are certainly not always oriented towards the pursuit of truth.

00:52:04.580 But our institutions have evolved to turn male stupidity and competitiveness and silliness, 0.99

00:52:13.700 I have three boys, I deal with it a lot, to turn that into, to channel that towards the pursuit 1.00

00:52:20.180 of truth. So even if you are at one of the mixed policy dinners that Meghan McArdle was talking about,

00:52:24.500 and it's a lot of people trying to show that they're smarter than the other people at the end

00:52:27.460 of the table, everybody else in the room learns a lot. You know, the fact that you're trying to do

00:52:32.580 that kind of one-upsmanship tends to lead to a good conversation and to advance, certainly

00:52:38.900 with greater celerity than the all-female policy dinners, which I have also been at,

00:52:42.820 which do tend to move really slow because there's a lot of compliments in telling each other how great

00:52:46.660 they are. Nothing against it. It's, I love, I love compliments, but you know, it's, it does take up

00:52:51.780 a lot of time. You know, and what, well, moving on. No, hold on, hold on, hold on. Sorry, sorry to

00:52:58.660 interrupt. But can we come back to this point about media? Because the, the broadcast scene,

00:53:06.740 I just genuinely don't think with all respect or our fellow YouTubers and podcasters has created an

00:53:14.180 environment that is more focused on the pursuit of truth. And that to me is kind of the big issue with

00:53:19.300 the argument you're making. Do you have any more to say on that aspect of it?

00:53:22.740 I mean, I'm, I'm not sure that the purpose of a podcast is always just the pursuit of truth,

00:53:31.460 right? At a certain level, it's also about entertainment. It's also about growing your

00:53:35.620 audience. You know, I've, I've worked at a lot of publications where you have meetings and sit down

00:53:40.500 and ask basic questions like, what is our purpose? And truth is a part of it. And, and one that you

00:53:47.220 always want to keep front and center, but I'm not sure it's the only thing, but I guess the, my,

00:53:51.620 my real response is that there are definitely masculine modes of failure as well. So it is,

00:53:57.620 it is very possible for institutions to fail in masculine, distinctively masculine ways that they

00:54:03.300 would not have failed if there had been more ladies in the room. But when I look at the world 0.99

00:54:07.020 around me today, I don't see a lot of institutions failing in that way. I do see a lot of institutions

00:54:11.760 failing in distinctly feminine ways. And would you say particularly a good example of this might be

00:54:18.380 something like Disney, for instance, where they produce, you know, you produce content that shall

00:54:23.280 we say is hyper-liberal, progressive, woke, whatever way you want to describe it. No one wants to watch

00:54:28.540 it. And is everybody's like, why is there a trans person in my Star Wars movie?

00:54:33.020 Yeah. And, and, and it doesn't even have sort of masculine coded stories of adventure and,

00:54:38.380 and things like that.

00:54:39.380 Because to me, the thing that I found surprising as somebody who loves movies, loves series,

00:54:47.080 not particularly huge Star Wars fan, what I couldn't understand is again and again,

00:54:51.320 why are you producing content that the hardcore of your fan base won't like? That to me seems

00:54:58.560 like glorified economic financial suicide.

00:55:01.420 I'm not a Star Wars fan, but I have heard that. I have heard that feedback from people I know who

00:55:05.720 do love Star Wars. It's a, it's a boy franchise. Why are you making the girl, a girl movie in your

00:55:10.680 boy franchise? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I don't know.

00:55:13.360 Right. So it isn't just Star Wars, but I guess the, the, the thing that I kind of wanted to drill

00:55:19.480 down upon is we've talked about the peak of woke. Do you think that we've now coming to the end of it,

00:55:28.200 or do you think that it will always remain there later because of this feminization process that

00:55:34.380 you've described? Yeah. I'm, I'm worried that it will, it will still be there. Um, that it,

00:55:41.220 it's only a matter of time before somebody whips up another, um, moral outrage that we all have to

00:55:48.240 be hysterical about because the, the way that we neutralize those kinds of mass hysteria episodes

00:55:54.760 is by talking about them rationally. And if we don't do that anymore, then we're not going to

00:55:59.460 be able to neutralize them. But it's also as well, and constant touched on it with his argument

00:56:03.640 without, with the podcast scene, which is basically people respond to incentives, social media also

00:56:09.760 rewards people who make history on it, overblown, ridiculous arguments because they create the most

00:56:17.200 engagement. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm worried about that. And I think there are things we can do in the

00:56:23.080 meantime, right? Like I think universities today are very feminized. I think that is maybe a long-term 0.54

00:56:31.160 threat to their viability as institutions of the pursuit of truth, but we're not going to turn that

00:56:37.460 ship around in the next five years. So what can we do in the immediate future? Uh, I think

00:56:42.420 interim steps are always a good idea. You can have, uh, statements of academic freedom. You know,

00:56:50.540 I think definitely schools should try and put those in place now so that the next time wokeness rolls 1.00

00:56:55.680 around, we have tools in place to shut it down. But I think that as long as institutions remain

00:57:02.200 feminized, you're still going to have, the threat will still be there. And your, uh, treatment plan 0.98

00:57:08.820 would be to end affirmative action and retain the idea that we shouldn't discriminate against people,

00:57:18.060 but assess that on the basis of whether someone's actually been discriminated against as opposed to

00:57:23.340 the number of women you have at your company. That's right. Although in some cases that might

00:57:28.280 not be sufficient medicine. I think one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to me that the

00:57:37.300 great feminization is not entirely natural. It's not just a product of women have had now had a chance

00:57:44.200 to compete and it turns out they're better at everything. You know, it's not just a natural

00:57:47.160 result of women out-competing men, which is something that a lot of feminists say, right? 1.00

00:57:51.260 They say, well, why is your newsroom full of ladies? Because ladies are great journalists. I don't know 1.00

00:57:54.580 what to tell you. Um, the, the piece of evidence that persuaded me that that's not what's going on

00:57:59.640 is the way institutions tend to become more and more feminized with the passage of time.

00:58:06.420 If it were just a matter of women out-competing men, you would expect institutions to reach 50-50 0.97

00:58:11.680 gender parity and then roughly stay there, um, if you assume that talent is equally distributed.

00:58:17.000 But instead, we see that institutions that reach 50% women tend to then become 52, 55, 56. Uh, the 0.91

00:58:25.120 one institution that's way far out at the end of that process is psychology, the field of psychology.

00:58:31.160 Three quarters of graduate students in psychology now are women. It is an extremely feminized field. 0.99

00:58:37.400 And we see that over and over in other institutions as well, although usually not so far advanced.

00:58:43.100 Uh, as fields become feminized, uh, what it looks like to me is they become distinctly unwelcoming 0.99

00:58:48.960 to men. Because if you're a man and you're interested in psychology, maybe you're interested

00:58:53.580 in particular branches of psychology that tend to appeal to the male, male mind war, like

00:58:57.860 neuropsychology, the hard science stuff, whatever. But then you show up in your psychology department

00:59:02.100 and it's a bunch of women and they are not interested in the same aspects of psychology 1.00

00:59:06.360 that you are. They're not willing to debate with you in the way that you think academic

00:59:11.580 debate should be conducted. You just find the whole atmosphere really, really feminized and

00:59:15.480 you think, do I really want to spend my career here? I don't think I do. Or if you, I, I honestly

00:59:22.340 can't imagine what it would have been like to be a male New York Times reporter during peak

00:59:26.960 woke. Like we all caught a glimpse of the internal workings of that institution during the Barry

00:59:33.800 Weiss saga when they bullied her out of her job. But it really did seem to be a quite a

00:59:41.340 toxic place with lots of backbiting and gossip and factions and teams and cruelty to people

00:59:47.100 who work for your same employer to whom you owe a duty of basic professionalism. So people

00:59:52.720 seem not to be meeting that basic duty. And I think if you were a man, you would find all

00:59:56.900 of that deeply alienating. Any human being would find that deeply alienating. So what that means

01:00:01.980 is if you're in an institution that has become feminized, it's only going to get more feminized

01:00:06.060 as men find it unwelcoming and go away. If we now want to reverse that process, we may have to carve 0.96

01:00:11.760 out little islands within psychology or journalism or wherever and say, all right, this is going to be

01:00:17.420 a safe space for men to pursue this institution or this field in a masculine way. And we're all going

01:00:23.800 to let them do that. And it's not going to be a problem.

01:00:25.140 Well, one of the things that occurred to me as you were talking is one of the reasons an

01:00:28.340 institution might carry on with this sort of runaway feminization, to borrow a term from the

01:00:33.280 climate change debate, is the other point you made earlier, which is that I can easily imagine

01:00:40.780 being a being me in a New York Times editorial room going in my head, well, this is all crazy.

01:00:48.640 Like, why are we doing this? But if you feel the way the wind is blowing, you're probably not going

01:00:54.180 to say anything. And so the corrective mechanism that would have existed once, which is, guys,

01:01:00.020 guys, what are we doing? That doesn't really exist because dissent is not part of the process.

01:01:06.460 It's not encouraged and tolerated. It's punished and ostracized. That would sort of explain the

01:01:12.700 runaway dimension of all of this, right?

01:01:15.000 Definitely.

01:01:16.400 Okay. That makes sense to me.

01:01:17.920 The thing that also that I worry, and I've been talking about this quite a bit, Constance is going

01:01:23.740 to...

01:01:24.940 Is your mother from Venezuela, mate?

01:01:26.600 No, I used to be a teacher.

01:01:28.200 All right, go on.

01:01:28.800 No, it's the kind of a death of the maverick, essentially.

01:01:31.860 We used to see, you know, whether it was in movie making or acting or journalism and all

01:01:39.420 these professions, there'd be that kind of rebel voice, which was kind of accepted and

01:01:45.000 tolerated within the industry because they'd be like, I mean, he's kind of, and it all frequently

01:01:49.920 was a he. I mean, he's kind of kooky, but sometimes, you know, he'll say things or do things. 0.51

01:01:55.560 You'll be like, wow, that is genuinely brilliant.

01:01:57.400 And he's the only one capable of that because he's got this, you know, quirky, individualistic,

01:02:03.860 rebel-type mindset.

01:02:05.500 And my concern is with the feminization, if it's true, and I believe it is, which values 1.00

01:02:11.720 homogeneity, you're going to eliminate those voices.

01:02:15.760 And those voices or personalities are very frequently the people who drive an industry

01:02:21.020 forward because they're the ones who innovate.

01:02:23.580 And it's so hard to quantify that, right?

01:02:25.720 So when people come to me and say, what have been the negative effects of the great

01:02:28.660 feminization, that I think is at the very top of my list.

01:02:32.100 That's one of the most important ones, that if you've got HR ladies planted in every single 1.00

01:02:36.460 institution and who see it as their mission to get rid of exactly that maverick type of 0.66

01:02:40.600 personality, there's so much innovation that we're missing out on, but we don't know what

01:02:45.500 would have been.

01:02:47.020 One of the cancellations that affected me very emotionally, very deeply was, I can't remember

01:02:52.100 the guy's name, but he was the astronomer or astrophysicist who had just, like, landed

01:02:57.140 a satellite on a comet or something really impressive like that, but he was wearing the

01:03:01.580 t-shirt with the scantily clad ladies on it. 0.95

01:03:03.940 It was like a bowling t-shirt.

01:03:05.460 I remember this.

01:03:06.280 Yeah.

01:03:06.540 And somebody said, oh no, he's got scantily clad women on his t-shirt, and they put him 0.99

01:03:10.560 through a struggle session for disrespecting women. 1.00

01:03:12.640 And I was thinking, this guy just landed a satellite on a comet.

01:03:17.020 Focus on that.

01:03:17.760 He's so impressive, and you're putting him through this horrible public shaming.

01:03:21.600 But that's the way wokeness works. 0.76

01:03:24.860 It doesn't even register to these people that this guy has done something deeply scientifically

01:03:30.140 impressive, that he might be a singular human being.

01:03:32.740 For all you know, he might be the only person on the planet who could have done that, and

01:03:35.880 all you care about is the shirt he's wearing.

01:03:37.540 You might phrase it as, it's not mission-driven, it's process-driven.

01:03:41.740 Yes.

01:03:42.000 And if you take away the male or female out of this entirely, if you look at industries,

01:03:48.880 departments, government departments, et cetera, if you think about some, you know, we run

01:03:54.120 a small business, which is what our podcast is, we only care about one thing.

01:03:58.460 That's the results.

01:03:59.540 That's the mission.

01:04:00.660 If we cared more about the process, I can immediately tell you that would make a worse product.

01:04:06.520 But it's natural.

01:04:07.580 It's the end.

01:04:08.220 Of course, if you focus on the mission, you're probably going to do.

01:04:12.000 Everything towards the mission.

01:04:13.380 If you focus on the process, the mission is secondary by nature.

01:04:17.300 So I guess what you're saying is we've kind of gone a little bit too far in the process

01:04:21.880 direction.

01:04:22.840 There's a reason why you tend to see women underrepresented at startups, because startups 1.00

01:04:27.860 of all the kinds of institutions in the world tend to be the most mission-driven.

01:04:31.700 They're all focused on just one thing, getting this company up off the ground.

01:04:35.060 You start to see more female employees when it becomes a bigger institution that has an 1.00

01:04:40.260 HR department and more staff and things like that.

01:04:42.680 Women tend to thrive in that. 1.00

01:04:44.800 But when it's just five guys in a garage, as a matter of simple demographics and observation,

01:04:50.220 we observe that there are fewer women in companies of that kind. 1.00

01:04:53.640 All right, Helen, one thanks to you.

01:04:54.780 We're not hiring any more women. 1.00

01:04:56.700 It's just white men from here on in. 0.72

01:04:58.460 Yeah, that's it.

01:04:59.060 It's all about the mission.

01:05:00.100 The mission is to keep a male. 1.00

01:05:02.080 Helen, it's been great talking to you.

01:05:03.280 Thank you for coming on.

01:05:04.040 It's a very interesting perspective.

01:05:05.560 We're going to go to Substack, where our audience is going to ask you their questions.

01:05:09.900 But before we do, we always end with the same question in our main interview, which is,

01:05:13.880 what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

01:05:18.280 Falling birth rate.

01:05:19.560 Yeah, we've talked about that a lot on this show, but I totally agree with you.

01:05:23.480 Other people.

01:05:24.380 Other people.

01:05:24.760 Less enlightened people.

01:05:25.900 Less enlightened people need to talk more about that.

01:05:28.180 Thank you so much for coming on.

01:05:29.400 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where we're going to ask Helen your questions.

01:05:32.980 How do we let women have the same or similar opportunities as men without them being required 1.00

01:05:39.140 to abandon their femininity? 1.00

01:05:40.900 And how do we let men have the same opportunities as women without them being required to abandon 0.91

01:05:45.120 their masculinity?

01:06:02.980 We'll let people have to learn more about that.

01:06:06.820 We'll be right back.

01:06:09.260 We'll be right back.

01:06:10.780 Bye.

01:06:11.420 Bye.

01:06:11.900 Bye.

01:06:13.040 Bye.

01:06:13.760 Bye.

01:06:13.900 Bye.

01:06:14.740 Bye.

01:06:14.960 Bye.

01:06:16.820 Bye.

01:06:19.040 Bye.

01:06:21.320 Bye.

01:06:22.280 Bye.

01:06:23.660 Bye.

01:06:24.780 Bye.

01:06:25.380 Bye.

01:06:28.160 Bye.

01:06:31.280 Bye.

01:06:32.000 Bye.

TRIGGERnometry - December 31, 2025

The Problem With Feminising Society - Helen Andrews

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