HELEN ANDREWS: The Great Feminization.
Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?
Possibly because, like most people, I think of feminization as something that happened in the past before I was born. When we think about women in the legal profession, for example, we think of the first woman to attend law school (1869), the first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court (1880), or the first female Supreme Court Justice (1981).
A much more important tipping point is when law schools became majority female, which occurred in 2016, or when law firm associates became majority female, which occurred in 2023. When Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed to the high court, only 5 percent of judges were female. Today women are 33 percent of the judges in America and 63 percent of the judges appointed by President Joe Biden.
The same trajectory can be seen in many professions: a pioneering generation of women in the 1960s and ’70s; increasing female representation through the 1980s and ’90s; and gender parity finally arriving, at least in the younger cohorts, in the 2010s or 2020s. In 1974, only 10 percent of New York Times reporters were female. The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent.
Medical schools became majority female in 2019. Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019. Women became a majority of college instructors in 2023. Women are not yet a majority of the managers in America but they might be soon, as they are now 46 percent. So the timing fits. Wokeness arose around the same time that many important institutions tipped demographically from majority male to majority female.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs responds to Andrews’ essay: After the patriarchy: The HR lady is in charge now.
Women have gained power because of anti-discrimination law, not because they’re outcompeting men, Andrews believes. In a much-quoted line she writes: “Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.”
I remember the bad old days when many opportunities were closed to women, and I’m not convinced of Andrews’ thesis, but I’m OK with her proposed solution. She thinks ” fair rules ” — not firing the uppity women — is the answer. “Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out,” she writes. “Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power.”
We all hate the HR lady, don’t we?
To be fair, this isn’t all that new a development:
