The Problem With Feminising Society - Helen Andrews
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
176.34949
Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, I talk with Helen Halsted about why Wokeness is dead, and why we should be worried about it. Helen is a writer at The New York Times, and she wrote an article based on a speech she gave at the 2019 National Achievers Congress, which exploded the internet.
Transcript
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The channeling of so many women of childbearing age into the workforce has had two really big
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potentially civilization-ending consequences. One is the one I've been talking about, which is the
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feminization of institutions. The other is declining birth rates. That too can cause the
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end of your civilization. I don't think wokeness is an ideology. If it's an ideology, the way we
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get rid of it is by having better arguments. But if wokeness is an inevitable result of demographic
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feminization, then we really can't trust that wokeness is over.
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It's great to have you on. You wrote an article based on a speech you gave at the NatCon conference,
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which exploded the internet, I think it's fair to say, when super viral caused a lot of debate and
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discussion. And it's basically, I mean, I'll let you say in your own words, but it's kind of a little
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bit about how the fact that women now control or at least represent the majority of the employees at
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many institutions is one of the reasons that society has gone the way it has. Is that fair?
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I think that's fair to say. Some people have reacted to the piece by, you know, acting as if
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I'm saying women cause all the problems in the world. I'm definitely not saying that, but I am
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saying that feminization has caused one specific particular problem, and that is wokeness. Like a
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lot of people, I was baffled by the woke phenomenon. Why did everyone seemingly go crazy all at once in the
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summer of 2020? It was inexplicable. It seemed to be mass hysteria, genuinely. And the more I thought
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about what caused it, which is a very important question, because if we know what causes it, we
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know how to prevent it from happening in the future. I read an article that someone else wrote that put
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forward a really simple, elegant thesis, which is that wokeness is simply feminine patterns of behavior
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applied to institutions where women had not been very well represented until recently.
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Women tend to be more consensus-focused, consensus-oriented. Men, when they're approaching
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a moral question, will ask, what are the facts? What are the rules? Whereas women will say, what are
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the relationships at play here? How can we make everybody happy? How can we reach an outcome that
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will satisfy all the parties, as opposed to the male perspective of how do we reach an outcome that is
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just and according to the rules? That sounded a lot like wokeness to me. And the sort of piece that
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made it all click into place for me was the coincidence of timing. It is the case, just we can
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all agree, as a matter of fact, that a lot of institutions that went woke or were affected by
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wokeness became demographically female in the last five years. Law schools in America turned majority
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female in 2016, and they've gotten a little bit more female every year since then. I think now it
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stands at 55, 56 percent. The New York Times became majority female in its workforce in 2018, which is
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maybe why it was so susceptible to the fads of wokeness and the internal policing and the slack
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revolts that took place internally over there. Medical schools are now majority female. The white-collar
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workforce overall. Employees in the United States with college degrees, a majority of them are women.
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And managers, management positions in the U.S. workforce, 46 percent female, so almost majority
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female. So the fact that all of these institutions tipped over to being majority female around the same
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time that wokeness emerged seemed to me that couldn't possibly be a coincidence.
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Mm-hmm. And there's so many questions within that. I guess the first stress test of this
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argument would be, well, they were also very close to being majority female 10 years prior to that,
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right? So does going from 48 to 52 percent, is that really such a major shift that it would cause
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something as dramatic as that? Well, you'd be surprised. I thought that the higher education
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workforce professors in the United States would have gone female ages and ages ago, but it actually
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only took female in 2023. So we think of feminization as something that happened a long time ago, but it
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really does take a certain amount of time for time to pass and older generations to retire. But I think
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the reason why attaining a critical mass of women has such a dramatic effect is that we're not talking
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about individual differences, differences between individual men and individual women, but differences
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in group dynamics. For example, you might be able to say from the perspective of psychology as a discipline
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that women tend to be more emotional than men and men tend to be more rational or any kind of
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generalization about men and women might have a certain amount of empirical support based on surveys.
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But at the end of the day, those differences are not massive, right? Like female support for free
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speech is greater or is less than male by double digits, but not, you know, it's not like night and
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day. But when it comes to group dynamics, how does an organization function? How does an institution
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deal with conflict? When you're talking about those kinds of things, those tend to be more binary.
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Like either you solve your conflicts within an organization in a masculine way or in a feminine way.
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Either open conflict is something that your institution will tolerate or it's not. So that's the kind of
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thing where once you get a critical mass, you really kind of have to pick which one you're going to do.
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Well, you mentioned consensus and sort of empathy and including all perspectives. That really isn't what
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happened with wokeness, though, is it? Because it was more like we've come to a new consensus and anybody
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doesn't agree is going to get killed, basically. Is that really I mean, that might be the way women
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deal with this on a group basis. I don't know. You tell me. No, it's it's it's hard to verbalize
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some of these differences because you you know, it might be a convenient shorthand to say men are
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more comfortable with conflict than women. I think that that makes a lot of sense. Right. But
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a famous psychology study, very often, if you're studying gender differences, you'll and you're a
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psychologist, the way you'll do your studies, you'll just go to a playground and watch the kids
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playing and observe and count up how many times somebody hits somebody else or something like that.
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And there was an experiment of that type done, I believe, in Scandinavia, and it had a really funny
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outcome. They the psychologists observed the kids playing and counted up how many fights they had.
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And they said, OK, we observe that the men fight a lot more than the girls. But then as a supplement,
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they decided to confirm their observations by talking to the kids and saying, how many fights
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did you have today, Billy, or how many fights did you have today, Sally? And it was their discrepancy
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was huge. They found that the girls reported having just as many fights as the men. The level of
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conflict, male and female, on that schoolyard was exactly the same. But their observations had failed
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to record any of the female conflicts. Because when they asked the girls, oh, you had a fight
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today. What did that entail? It was things like Megan said she was going to tell everybody they
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couldn't be my friend anymore. Which is where words of violence comes from. I imagine you're right.
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That's right. That's right. And one of the most consistent psychological differences between men
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and women is women have a strong impulse of caring. Which is exactly, I mean, I'm not somebody who looks
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to evolutionary biology for the solutions to all human phenomena. But this particular one does seem
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glaringly Darwinian, right? That women see helpless things and they want to take care of them. That is
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definitely something that Darwin would find a pretty easy explanation for. But that's also something
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that wokeness can easily weaponize. It means that if you can frame your political issue as a way of
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caring for some helpless class, then you're golden, right? Minorities are babies. That's right.
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And but that is that is precisely what's going on at a deeper level. And that's why it's been so
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effective. And Helen, your article, and I encourage everyone to read it, it's fascinating whether you
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agree or disagree with it. But you cited one particular case, which is the former president
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of Harvard. So let's talk about that, because you use it as an as the main example for the thrust of
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your argument. That's right. This was back in 2005. This is before anybody had ever heard of wokeness.
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Now, I don't know if your listeners in the UK will be familiar with Larry Summers, but he was at that
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time, probably one of the 10 most powerful people in the country. He was not just the president of
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Harvard. He had also been in Bill Clinton's cabinet. He had been at the World Bank. He was an
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academically eminent economist, very well connected in the Democratic Party, just a really powerful
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guy. He was invited to give a speech at a conference on female underrepresentation in science
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and math. And he decided to deliver his remarks off the cuff and to be really. And actually, if you know
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anything about Larry Summers, he has a reputation for being a really blunt guy. He's somebody who does
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not suffer fools gladly. So when you're getting the blunt Larry Summers, you're really getting
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something quite direct. But the talk was supposed to be off the record. And that's important to
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emphasize that the women who listened to what he said and took it to a reporter were violating the
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rules that they had undertaken to follow when they attended. Anyway, he said that female
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underrepresentation in the hard sciences was attributable to a lot of different factors, not
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necessarily just prejudice or bias or the patriarchy not thinking ladies can be scientists. There is a
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difference of aptitude at the very, very, very high ends. If you're talking about people who are going
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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
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than women. And also differences in taste. That is, women tend to gravitate towards professions and fields where
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they get to deal with people as opposed to something really cold and abstract like physics. Not to say that
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no women do, but that is the tendency. So women who are way out there at that end of the bell curve
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and have the aptitude for a career in hard science would maybe gravitate to something like medicine
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as opposed to something like physics. So Larry Summers said all this, and there were a bunch of
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lady scientists in the audience who said, how dare you? And they gave quotes to a reporter something
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like, I felt like I was going to throw up or I thought I was going to black out. And it became a huge
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controversy. And there were a lot of other controversies during Larry Summers' tenure as president of
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Harvard. So that was not the only thing that brought him down, but it was definitely at the very top of the
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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
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and basically went, I'm going to freestyle and deliver truth bombs to all of you. So here we are, enjoy it.
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But he's also, if you get to be president of Harvard, you are going to make enemies aplenty.
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In order to get to that position, you're going to have to fire people, antagonize people, because
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that's just the nature of the job. So he would have had loads of enemies who were willing just to pounce
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Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I'm trying to remember some of the other controversies that have attended Larry Summers'
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career. And I believe one from his tenure at the World Bank was when he said, are we sure we want to
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really, really enforce labor laws against having sweatshops in third world countries? Because isn't having sweatshops
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good for them sometimes? I mean, it leads to economic development. He phrased it in a really blunt way.
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I feel like this is a guy who has a history of putting his foot in his mouth in a way that I
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frankly find really admirable. But certain people don't. So then has that been extrapolated right
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the way through society, essentially, is your argument? That that was one of the first times
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that a cancellation happened, that people heard somebody say something offensive, pitched a little
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fit, and managed to rob this person of his job. And the particular aspect of it that seemed so full
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foreboding looking back, is that there was no attempt to debate the issue rationally. There were plenty
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of people, even people on the Harvard faculty, with eminent expertise in the relevant scientific fields,
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willing to stand up and say everything Larry Summers said was perfectly within the scientific mainstream.
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Greater male variability, that's, you know, everybody thinks that. So there were people willing to say
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he's right on the facts. Criticize him all you want for his tone, but he was right on the facts.
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And the women who went after his job were not willing to have that debate. They were not willing
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to talk about it rationally. They just said, I'm offended. I felt like I was going to black out. He was
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invalidating my career. This is everything I work for. Very much a feelings over facts kind of thing.
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And so I don't mind if there are people who are feminists or who have different political views
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to those that I have. But it's important that we be able to debate them, right? That we have
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rational arguments. And this was one of the first instances where people just said, no, I'm not
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going to, I'm not going to debate it. I'm just going to say I'm offended. And that's going to be
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the end of the story. Because Jordan Peterson used to talk a lot about this, where he used to talk about
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one of the ways that females try and destroy or attack other people isn't through the physical
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realm. It's through reputation destruction. And this is essentially what you're talking about,
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And one of the other things, I don't know if, I hope I'm not revealing anything that I shouldn't in
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terms of, because I can't remember if this is something I heard Jordan say publicly or privately,
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but I don't think you'd mind me sharing this. I mean, one of the things she talked to me about
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was the fact that the female mind sort of has three categories for other human beings. One of them is
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baby, i.e. infant needs care. Another one is caregiver, i.e. spouse, you know, mother-in-law,
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et cetera. And then it sort of kind of makes sense to treat everybody else as a potential enemy just
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from a safety perspective. Well, you don't know them, so you might as well make sure that you are
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extra careful. And what you do with the enemy, if you establish that they're the enemy, is you get
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away, and if you can't, you destroy them somehow, right? And if we accept your thesis, which is
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women and minorities fit the infant category, then anyone who appears to in any way be not on board
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with eternal empowerment, let's call it that, they would automatically go in the enemy box.
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And then what happens is what happens to Larry. Yeah, I like Jordan Peterson a lot. I think he's
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a very wise person. But to be honest, this sort of mythology of gender differences was never something
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that interested me. It was never a topic that I ever anticipated I would be writing about. It's just
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not my cup of tea. Because it seems like a kind of debate that goes in circles and has gone in circles
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for centuries. There have been battles between the male and the female since the dawn of time,
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since before the dawn of time. The primates, there are battles between men and women. It's definitely
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a topic of debate that has been returned to and recycled over the centuries. The reason why this
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feminization thesis kind of sparked my interest in a way that gender dynamics in general never really did
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is that it is something unprecedented. It is that miraculous thing, something in the gender wars
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that is truly new. We have never, no civilization on the planet has ever had a situation where they
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can look forward to a day when a majority of judges are going to be female. Or they can anticipate a day
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not too long from now when the majority of legislators in their parliament are going to be female. When they
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have female police chiefs in their largest cities. Or, you know, the legal profession in general is on its way
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to being majority female. That is something unprecedented. So it's really not that surprising
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and shouldn't really be that controversial to say that something no civilization in human history has
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ever faced is posing new problems that we haven't seen before. And how do you frame this in your mind?
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Are you saying, well, look, we're rebalancing society. And as a result of this, we will have
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institutions and discourse and a way of doing politics and a way of doing many things that is
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more female. And, you know, we're rebalancing society and that's great. Or that, that like any
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change that causes problems, but it also brings benefits. Or is your contention that the increasing
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feminization of institutions is in and of itself a negative because that way of doing things is less
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suited to the purpose of those institutions? Because those are very different perspectives.
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It's all about the purpose of the institution. So you have to judge it on a case-by-case basis.
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The most feminized profession in America today is veterinary medicine. All of the veterinarians in
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America are ladies now. I don't know why that happened, but 80% of students at veterinary schools
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are women now. It's possible that that has had catastrophic effects that I'm not aware of,
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but I'm pretty comfortable with that. I don't think that's going to lead to the end of civilization
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because there's nothing about feminine modes of interaction that is contrary to the essence
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of veterinary medicine. However, I think if you're a university, that might be one where if you have
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modes of group interaction that are oriented towards conformity and consensus, that's not compatible
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with what a university is supposed to do. A university is supposed to be a safe place for
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prickly, eccentric characters who believe things that nobody else believes because they've studied
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an issue really hard and they're, you know, disagreeable. That's the university should be a
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place for them. And if you're now running your English department in a way that you no longer tolerate
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characters of that description, that seems like a problem. In the case of business, that's one
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where I can imagine some businesses where feminine modes of interaction would be an advantage and
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would lead your business to flourish. I can imagine other businesses where the HR-ification of the
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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
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world out there. Everybody can find the kind of workplace that is most compatible with their own
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preferences. The problem is that in the United States right now, there are a lot of legal thumbs
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on the scale that tend to really, really empower the HR lady in your office and give her a veto power
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of everything that anybody does who works at your company. And that has led to a feminization of
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every workplace, every large institution in America. So I think that is a thumb on the scale
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that makes it hard for institutions that might be more suited to masculine modes of interaction to
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pursue them. So yeah, and it has to be judged on a case-by-case basis. There are examples of
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feminization that are fine. There are examples of feminization that are advantageous. So you just have
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to judge it against whether or not it serves the purpose of the institution, and also whether or
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not that feminization was naturally occurring, or whether it was just the HR lady coming in and
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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
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
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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
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people who just really don't know what the law mandates today. People out there who read it did
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not believe me when I said that you can be sued for not hiring enough women at your company and for not
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promoting enough women at your company. But that is truly the case. One of the most famous gender
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discrimination lawsuits in American history was the Sears case, which was launched by the Equal
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Employment Opportunity Commission in 1980 against Sears, the big retailer. Specifically, they allege
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that Sears was channeling women into non-commissioned sales positions and away from the commissioned
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sales positions, which tended to be more irregularly remunerated because it's a commission sales
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position. So you had good months and bad months, but you generally got higher pay.
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Sears responded to this lawsuit by saying, look, the statistical disparity is there. You're right.
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Our female employees tend to prefer lower paying but more stable remuneration packages.
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We've tried to get them interested in this one and they just won't do it. But the EEOC said, no,
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it's only because you are biased against women that you have the statistical disparity. And the thing
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that makes the Sears case so famous in the annals of these lawsuits is that their case was entirely
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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,
00:24:59.300
a judge ruled in Sears's favor. So Sears won that case. The EEOC did not prevail in their purely
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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,
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.
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
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
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
00:27:22.020
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,
00:28:39.700
let's be honest about this. Until relatively recently, women had a pretty tough time of it.
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
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
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
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,
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,
00:33:58.660
could then go to their university and say, you know, that guy raped me or whatever. And then the
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
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
00:38:40.980
thumbs on the scale, that the problem of the great feminization would take care of itself.
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.
00:39:14.420
Uh, but that's been the case since the 1980s. I think the female advantage in post-secondary
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
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
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,
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
00:40:22.820
psychoanalyze that that is exactly what is going on. Um, but I think the great feminization, the
00:40:30.260
channeling of so many women of childbearing age into the workforce has had two really big,
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
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
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,
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.
00:42:56.420
Stay quiet for all women's kids. Do you understand that?
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,
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.
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
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,
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.
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
00:46:02.180
so many women into the workplace, your argument is you've affirmative action them somewhat into the
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,
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
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
00:47:42.580
workforce for a few years while their kids are young. So that's what women still want. And the women
00:47:48.740
whose husbands do earn enough tend to do exactly that. Even really accomplished women, women with
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
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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
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,
00:52:13.700
I have three boys, I deal with it a lot, to turn that into, to channel that towards the pursuit
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
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,
00:54:39.380
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
00:55:01.420
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
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
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
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?
00:57:51.260
They say, well, why is your newsroom full of ladies? Because ladies are great journalists. I don't know
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
01:01:17.920
The thing that also that I worry, and I've been talking about this quite a bit, Constance is going
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.
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,
01:02:05.500
And my concern is with the feminization, if it's true, and I believe it is, which values
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
01:02:25.720
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
01:02:36.460
institution and who see it as their mission to get rid of exactly that maverick type of
01:02:40.600
personality, there's so much innovation that we're missing out on, but we don't know what
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
01:03:06.540
And somebody said, oh no, he's got scantily clad women on his t-shirt, and they put him
01:03:10.560
through a struggle session for disrespecting women.
01:03:12.640
And I was thinking, this guy just landed a satellite on a comet.
01:03:17.760
He's so impressive, and you're putting him through this horrible public shaming.
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
01:03:37.540
You might phrase it as, it's not mission-driven, it's process-driven.
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.
01:04:00.660
If we cared more about the process, I can immediately tell you that would make a worse product.
01:04:08.220
Of course, if you focus on the mission, you're probably going to do.
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
01:04:22.840
There's a reason why you tend to see women underrepresented at startups, because startups
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
01:04:40.260
HR department and more staff and things like that.
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.
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?
01:05:19.560
Yeah, we've talked about that a lot on this show, but I totally agree with you.
01:05:25.900
Less enlightened people need to talk more about that.
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
01:05:40.900
And how do we let men have the same opportunities as women without them being required to abandon
01:06:02.980
We'll let people have to learn more about that.