Here is the full transcript of journalist Helen Andrews’s interview on TRIGGERnometry Podcast, January 1, 2026.
Brief Notes: In this thought-provoking episode of Triggernometry, author and journalist Helen Andrews joins hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster to discuss her viral and controversial thesis on the “feminization” of modern institutions. Andrews argues that the shift toward majority-female workforces in fields like law, journalism, and academia has inadvertently fueled the rise of “wokeness,” prioritizing empathy and consensus-building over objective truth and rigorous debate.
The conversation explores the legal “thumbs on the scale” like DEI mandates and sexual harassment laws that she claims distort pure meritocracy, as well as the potential long-term civilizational impacts of declining birth rates and the “two-income trap”. Ultimately, Andrews makes a case for preserving “masculine modes of interaction” in certain spheres to protect innovation and the “maverick” spirit necessary for institutional success.
Introduction
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Helen, welcome to TRIGGERnometry.
HELEN ANDREWS: Thanks for having me.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s great to have you on. You wrote an article based on a speech you gave at the NATCON conference which exploded the Internet, I think it’s fair to say. It went super viral, caused a lot of debate and discussion. It’s basically—I mean, I’ll let you say it in your own words—but it’s kind of a little bit about how the fact that women now control, or at least represent the majority of the employees at many institutions, is one of the reasons that society has gone the way it has. Is that fair?
The Feminization Thesis and Wokeness
HELEN ANDREWS: I think that’s fair to say. Some people have reacted to the piece by acting as if I’m saying women cause all the problems in the world. I’m definitely not saying that, but I am saying that feminization has caused one specific particular problem, and that is wokeness.
Like a lot of people, I was baffled by the woke phenomenon. Why did everyone seemingly go crazy all at once in the summer of 2020? It was inexplicable. It seemed to be mass hysteria, genuinely. And the more I thought about what caused it—which is a very important question, because if we know what causes it, we know how to prevent it from happening in the future—I read an article that someone else wrote that put forward a really simple, elegant thesis, which is that wokeness is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women had not been very well represented until recently.
Women tend to be more consensus-focused, consensus-oriented. Men, when they’re approaching a moral question, will ask, “What are the facts? What are the rules?” Whereas women will say, “What are the relationships at play here? How can we make everybody happy? How can we reach an outcome that will satisfy all the parties?” as opposed to the male perspective of “How do we reach an outcome that is just and according to the rules?”
That sounded a lot like wokeness to me. And the piece that made it all click into place for me was the coincidence of timing. It is the case—we can all agree, as a matter of fact—that a lot of institutions that went woke or were affected by wokeness became demographically female in the last five years.
Law schools in America turned majority female in 2016, and they’ve gotten a little bit more female every year since then. I think now it stands at 55, 56%. The New York Times became majority female in its workforce in 2018, which is maybe why it was so susceptible to the fads of wokeness and the internal policing and the Slack revolts that took place internally over there.
Medical schools are now majority female. The white-collar workforce overall—employees in the United States with college degrees—a majority of them are women. And managers, management positions in the US workforce, 46% female, so almost majority female. So the fact that all of these institutions tipped over to being majority female around the same time that wokeness emerged seemed to me that couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.
The Critical Mass Question
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And there’s so many questions within that. I guess the first stress test of this argument would be, well, they were also very close to being majority female 10 years prior to that, right? So does going from 48 to 52%—is that really such a major shift that it would cause something as dramatic as that?
HELEN ANDREWS: Well, you’d be surprised. I thought that the higher education workforce, professors in the United States, would have gone female ages and ages ago, but it actually only became majority female in 2023. So we think of feminization as something that happened a long time ago, but it really does take a certain amount of time for older generations to retire.
But I think the reason why attaining a critical mass of women has such a dramatic effect is that we’re not talking about individual differences—differences between individual men and individual women—but differences in group dynamics.
For example, you might be able to say from the perspective of psychology as a discipline that women tend to be more emotional than men and men tend to be more rational. Or any kind of generalization about men and women might have a certain amount of empirical support based on surveys, but at the end of the day, those differences are not massive, right? Female support for free speech is less than male by double digits, but it’s not like night and day.
But when it comes to group dynamics—how does an organization function? How does an institution deal with conflict?—when you’re talking about those kinds of things, those tend to be more binary. Either you solve your conflicts within an organization in a masculine way or in a feminine way. Either open conflict is something that your institution will tolerate or it’s not. So that’s the kind of thing where once you get a critical mass, you really kind of have to pick which one you’re going to do.
Consensus vs. Conflict
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, you mentioned consensus and sort of empathy and including all perspectives.
HELEN ANDREWS: No, it’s hard to verbalize some of these differences because it might be a convenient shorthand to say men are more comfortable with conflict than women. I think that makes a lot of sense.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.
HELEN ANDREWS: But a famous psychology study—very often, if you’re studying gender differences, you’ll end up, if you’re a psychologist, doing your study by just going to a playground and watching the kids playing and observing and counting up how many times somebody hits somebody else or something like that.
And there was an experiment of that type done, I believe, in Scandinavia, and it had a really funny outcome. The psychologists observed the kids playing and counted up how many fights they had. And they said, “Okay, we observe that the boys fight a lot more than the girls.”
But then as a supplement, they decided to confirm their observations by talking to the kids and saying, “How many fights did you have today, Billy?” or “How many fights did you have today, Sally?” And the discrepancy was huge. They found that the girls reported having just as many fights as the boys. The level of conflict, male and female, on that schoolyard was exactly the same.
But their observations had failed to record any of the female conflicts. Because when they asked the girls, “Oh, you had a fight today, what did that entail?” it was things like “Megan said she was going to tell everybody they couldn’t be my friend anymore.”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Which is where “words are violence” comes from, I imagine, in your argument.
HELEN ANDREWS: That’s right. That’s right. And one of the most consistent psychological differences between men and women is women have a strong impulse of caring.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.
The Caring Impulse and Political Weaponization
HELEN ANDREWS: Which is exactly—I mean, I’m not somebody who looks to evolutionary biology for the solutions to all human phenomena. But this particular one does seem glaringly Darwinian, right? That women see helpless things and they want to take care of them. That is definitely something that Darwin would find a pretty easy explanation for.
But that’s also something that wokeness can easily weaponize. It means that if you can frame your political issue as a way of caring for some helpless class, then you’re golden, right?
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Minorities are babies.
HELEN ANDREWS: That’s right. But that is precisely what’s going on at a deeper level, and that’s why it’s been so effective.
The Larry Summers Case Study
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And Helen, your article—and I encourage everyone to read it, it’s fascinating whether you agree or disagree with it—but you cited one particular case, which is the former president of Harvard. So let’s talk about that, because you use it as the main example for the thrust of your argument.
HELEN ANDREWS: That’s right. This was back in 2005. So this is before anybody had ever heard of wokeness. Now, I don’t know if your listeners in the UK will be familiar with Larry Summers, but he was at that time probably one of the 10 most powerful people in the country. He was not just the president of Harvard, he had also been in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. He had been at the World Bank. He was an academically eminent economist, very well connected in the Democratic Party, just a really powerful guy.
He was invited to give a speech at a conference on female underrepresentation in science and math. And he decided to deliver his remarks off the cuff and to be really—actually, if you know anything about Larry Summers, he has a reputation for being a really blunt guy. He’s somebody who does not suffer fools gladly. So when you’re getting the blunt Larry Summers, you’re really getting something quite direct.
But the talk was supposed to be off the record. And that’s important to emphasize that the women who listened to what he said and took it to a reporter were violating the rules that they had undertaken to follow when they attended.
Anyway, he said that female underrepresentation in the hard sciences was attributable to a lot of different factors, not necessarily just prejudice or bias or the patriarchy not thinking ladies can be scientists. There is a difference of aptitude at the very, very, very high ends. If you’re talking about people who are going 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 than women.
And also differences in taste—that is, women tend to gravitate towards professions and fields where they get to deal with people as opposed to something really cold and abstract like physics. Not to say that no women do, but that is the tendency. So women who are way out there at that end of the bell curve and have the aptitude for a career in hard science would maybe gravitate to something like medicine as opposed to something like physics.
So Larry Summers said all this, and there were a bunch of lady scientists in the audience who said, “How dare you?” And they gave quotes to a reporter, something like, “I felt like I was going to throw up” or “I thought I was going to black out.” And it became a huge controversy.
And there were a lot of other controversies during Larry Summers’ tenure as president of Harvard. So that was not the only thing that brought him down, but it was definitely at the very top of the list. And about a year later, he resigned.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: 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 and basically went, “I’m going to freestyle and deliver truth bombs to all of you. So here we are. Enjoy it.” But he’s also, if you get to be president of Harvard, you are going to make enemies aplenty in order to get to that position. You’re going to have to fire people, antagonize people, because that’s just the nature of the job. So he would have had loads of enemies who were willing just to pounce at that particular moment, surely.
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah. And I’m trying to remember some of the other controversies that attended Larry Summers’ career. And I believe one from his tenure at the World Bank was when he said, “Are we sure we want to really, really enforce labor laws against having sweatshops in third world countries? But isn’t having sweatshops good for them sometimes? I mean, it leads to economic development.” He phrased it in a really blunt way. So this is a guy who has a history of putting his foot in his mouth in a way that I frankly find really admirable.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: But certain people don’t. So then has that been extrapolated right through society, essentially, is your argument?
The End of Rational Debate
HELEN ANDREWS: That was one of the first times that a cancellation happened, that people heard somebody say something offensive, pitched a little fit, and managed to rob this person of his job. And the particular aspect of it that seemed so full of foreboding looking back is that there was no attempt to debate the issue rationally.
There were plenty of people, even people on the Harvard faculty with eminent expertise in the relevant scientific fields, willing to stand up and say everything Larry Summers said was perfectly within the scientific mainstream. Greater male variability—everybody thinks that. So there were people willing to say, “He’s right on the facts. Criticize him all you want for his tone, but he was right on the facts.”
And the women who went after his job were not willing to have that debate. They were not willing to talk about it rationally. They just said, “I’m offended. I felt like I was going to black out. He was invalidating my career. This is everything I work for”—very much a feelings over facts kind of thing.
And so I don’t mind if there are people who are feminists or who have different political views to those that I have. But it’s important that we be able to debate them, right? That we have rational arguments. And this was one of the first instances where people just said, “No, I’m not going to debate it. I’m just going to say I’m offended. And that’s going to be the end of the story.”
The Legal Framework Behind Institutional Change
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because Jordan Peterson used to talk a lot about this, where he used to talk about one of the ways that females try and destroy or attack other people isn’t through the physical realm. It’s reputation destruction. And this is essentially what you’re talking about, isn’t it?
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah, absolutely.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And one of the other things, I don’t know if I hope I’m not revealing anything that I shouldn’t in terms of, because I can’t remember if this is something I heard Jordan say publicly or privately. But I don’t think you’d mind me sharing this. I mean, one of the things he talked to me about was the fact that the female mind sort of has three categories for other human beings.
One of them is baby, that is infant needs care. Another one is caregiver, that is spouse, you know, mother-in-law, et cetera. And then it sort of kind of makes sense to treat everybody else as a potential enemy, just from a safety perspective. Well, you don’t know them, so you might as well make sure that you are extra careful.
And what you do with the enemy, if you establish that they’re the enemy, is you get away. And if you can’t, you destroy them somehow. Right. And if we accept your thesis, which is minor women and minorities fit the infant category, then anyone who appears to in any way be not on board with eternal empowerment, let’s call it that, they would automatically go in the enemy box. And then what happens is what happens to Larry.
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah, I like Jordan Peterson a lot. I think he’s a very wise person. But to be honest, this sort of mythology of gender differences was never something that interested me. It was never a topic that I ever anticipated I would be writing about. It’s just not my cup of tea because it seems like a kind of debate that goes in circles and has gone in circles for centuries.
There have been battles between the male and the female since the dawn of time, since before the dawn of time, the primates, there are battles between men and women. It’s definitely a topic of debate that has been returned to and recycled over the centuries.
The reason why this feminization thesis kind of sparked my interest in a way that gender dynamics in general never really did, is that it is something unprecedented. It is that miraculous thing, something in the gender wars that is truly new. We have never, no civilization on the planet has ever had a situation where they can look forward to a day when a majority of judges are going to be female, or they can anticipate a day not too long from now when the majority of legislators in their parliament are going to be female, when they have female police chiefs in their largest cities, or, you know, the legal profession in general is on its way to being majority female.
That is something unprecedented. So it’s really not that surprising and shouldn’t really be that controversial to say that something no civilization in human history has ever faced is posing new problems that we haven’t seen before.
Judging Feminization by Institutional Purpose
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And how do you frame this in your mind? Are you saying, well, look, we’re rebalancing society, and as a result of this, we will have institutions and discourse and a way of doing politics and a way of doing many things that is more female. And, you know, we’re balancing society. And that’s great. Or that like any change that causes problems, but it also brings benefits.
Or is your contention that the increasing feminization of institutions is in and of itself a negative because that way of doing things is less suited to the purpose of those institutions? Because those are very different perspectives.
HELEN ANDREWS: It’s all about the purpose of the institution. So you have to judge it on a case by case basis. The most feminized profession in America today is veterinary medicine. All of the veterinarians in America are ladies. Now, I don’t know why that happened, but 80% of students at veterinary schools are women.
Now, it’s possible that that has had catastrophic effects that I’m not aware of, but I’m pretty comfortable with that. I don’t think that’s going to lead to the end of civilization. Because there’s nothing about feminine modes of interaction that is contrary to the essence of veterinary medicine.
However, I think if you’re a university, that might be one where, if you have modes of group interaction that are oriented towards conformity and consensus, that’s not compatible with what a university is supposed to do. A university is supposed to be a safe place for prickly, eccentric characters who believe things that nobody else believes because they’ve studied an issue really hard and they’re, you know, disagreeable. That’s the university should be a place for them.
And if you’re now running your English department in a way that you no longer tolerate characters of that description, that seems like a problem. In the case of business, that’s one way where I can imagine some businesses where feminine modes of interaction would be an advantage and would lead your business to flourish. I can imagine other businesses where the HR-ification of the workplace is a major roadblock and makes it really hard for your business to do the things it was designed to do.
So in my perfect world, there would be room for both. It’s a big world out there. Everybody can find the kind of workplace that is most compatible with their own preferences. The problem is that in the United States right now, there are a lot of legal thumbs on the scale that tend to really, really empower the HR lady in your office and give her a veto power of everything that anybody does who works at your company.
And that has led to a feminization of every workplace, every large institution in America. So I think that is a thumb on the scale that makes it hard for institutions that might be more suited to masculine modes of interaction to pursue them. So, yeah, and it has to be judged on a case by case basis. There are examples of feminization that are fine. There are examples of feminization that are advantageous.
So you just have to judge it against whether or not it serves the purpose of the institution and also whether or not that feminization was naturally occurring or whether it was just the HR lady coming in and ruining things for everybody.
The Legal Thumbs on the Scale
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, in terms of the HR lady thing, I totally get what you’re saying. On the one hand, I also think, look, I’m 42 years old. Within my lifetime there would have been male bosses who would go around slapping their secretaries on the a. And that was the culture of that business, you know, you might say, well, you know, that business made more money and it was much more concerned about, you know, profits and they didn’t care about, you know, somebody had the wrong opinion and people weren’t getting canceled. But maybe that was a good thing to address.
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think sexual harassment is very bad that we have laws against it. But I think some of the reaction to the article I wrote that was negative came from people who just really don’t know what the law mandates today. People out there who read it did not believe me when I said that you can be sued for not hiring enough women at your company and for not promoting enough women at your company. But that is truly the case.
One of the most famous gender discrimination lawsuits in American history was the Sears case, which was launched by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1980 against Sears, the big retailer. Specifically, they alleged that Sears was channeling women into non-commission sales positions and away from the commission sales positions which tended to be more irregularly remunerated because it’s a commission sales position. So you had good months and bad months, but you generally got higher pay.
Sears responded to this lawsuit by saying, look, the statistical disparity is there. You’re right. Our female employees tend to prefer lower paying but more stable remuneration packages. We’ve tried to get them interested in this one and they just won’t do it. But the EEOC said no. It’s only because you are biased against women that you have the statistical disparity.
And the thing that makes the Sears case so famous in the annals of these lawsuits is that their case was entirely statistical, purely statistical. They did not have a single woman who claimed to have been discriminated against at Sears. All the women that Sears called said, we love it. We love this company. They’re really great. They’re a great place for a woman to work.
Now eventually, after six years, a judge ruled in Sears’ favor. So Sears won that case. The EEOC did not prevail in their purely statistical case. But it took Sears a lot of money to defend against that lawsuit. It did drag on for 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 case.
And the way that the law resolved this question of whether you could have a purely statistical case was to say it can’t be just statistics. You do need somebody who claims to have been discriminated against, but it can be primarily statistical. So it is simply true that if your company has men over-represented in management or in employees overall, that can be the basis for some woman to come along and file a lawsuit against you.
And that has occurred in many, many businesses and it usually doesn’t make the headlines. So people don’t really know that that’s what the law says. But Wall Street firms have been hit with things like this because they don’t have enough female traders. If you’re a business owner, you have to be aware of this. And so I think it is true, it is just fact as a matter of fact about the world that women are hired and promoted more than they would be in a pure meritocracy because of laws like that.
The Courage Deficit and Legal Liability
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because it always interested me with the whole kind of woke thing. And when we went peak nonsense, more people within the halls of power, wherever that may be, whether it be politics, business or wherever else go, no, you’re not going to have a glorified tantrum. And I always saw it as a courage deficit if I’m being honest. But now that you’ve explained, there’s a legal element to it, goes some way to explaining part of the problem.
HELEN ANDREWS: Well, think about James Damore, the guy at Google who wrote his memo saying basically the same Larry Summers argument all over again. The reason why Google fired him was not just because they had a staff revolt, it was because it made them vulnerable to a lawsuit.
If you have somebody who’s on the record saying “I think it’s possible that women are underrepresented at the extremes of aptitude,” then somebody who files a lawsuit can say “he doesn’t think women can be capable and that’s why he didn’t promote me or hire me or give me opportunities at work.” So yeah, there have, that is not the only case where that has happened that somebody has made a statement about gender differences that led their institution to fire them because they were worried about legal liability.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: But that seems to me so ridiculous because it’s a clear misrepresentation of the argument. Even you know, when I used to teach, I could do, you know, I could show that to my 14 or 15 year olds and go, why does that argument not scan? And they’d be able to explain it. So why can’t other people?
HELEN ANDREWS: I don’t know what to tell you. The trouble is that the law is just the simple 1964 Civil Rights law. You can’t discriminate against somebody on the basis of sex. And that sounds really great. I mean, the same way that the ERA sounded really great. Equal Rights Amendment. Who’s against equal rights?
But judges have extrapolated from that really simple statement all kinds of stuff and it has created an atmosphere of uncertainty. Right. So and that’s the thing that is most oppressive, that feels most totalitarian on a day to day basis. You really never know whether some behavior or some statement is against the law or not. Because a lot of stuff falls into the gray area of well, it’s not technically illegal, but if somebody sued our company, they might be able to cite that as evidence of an atmosphere of bias. And that’s just not the way law is supposed to work.
The Overcorrection Problem
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because what it seems to be is, look, let’s be honest about this. Until relatively recently, women had a pretty tough time of it. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, you know, easy to be a woman, particularly not in the workplace. You were likely to be discriminated against. There’s case after case, story after story. What it seems to me is that there has been an overcorrection by well-meaning people wanting to implement laws in order to protect women. And it’s kind of metastasized into something else.
The Legal System and Feminization
HELEN ANDREWS: And we have to keep in mind it’s not just about the people who work at an institution. If you’re talking about something like the legal system, I want female lawyers to be happy and have a good time, but that is not my top priority. My top priority is that we have a good legal system that’s functioning and leads to a just and fair society.
And we had increasing female representation in the legal system seems to have been accompanied by a lot more wokeness, which I think is more damaging in lawyers than it is in almost anywhere else. Because the law is the one field where you really want people to be as literal minded as possible, as devoted to the rules as possible, not fudging things so that everybody’s happy, really sticking to the letter of the law. And so if the law is corrupted, that’s something that I’m very, very worried about.
And we saw, we got a glimpse of what a maximally feminized legal system might look like here in the United States in our Title IX campus courts for sexual assault. I don’t know how it’s done in the UK, but here in the US in 2011, the Obama administration mandated that universities in the United States adopt certain rules for adjudicating allegations of sexual assault on campus.
Things like you had to use a preponderance of evidence standard, so no more proving things beyond a reasonable doubt. Men who were accused were no longer allowed to confront their accusers because that might be traumatizing. It was just basically the wish list that we saw during the MeToo era, which, you know, a lot of people were sympathetic to because nobody wants, you know, sexual abuse or sexual assault or anything like that.
But on the other hand, you also want these legal protections and due process protections that have evolved over centuries for very good reasons. And what we saw in the Title IX campus courts for sexual assault and what we saw during the MeToo movement was a willingness to throw out those due process protections because of a political commitment to feminist values.
And so I don’t want to see that attitude to the law expand to other fields because in the particular case of sexual assault, MeToo, it worked out really, really badly. A lot of people were unfairly accused and had their lives ruined. And it was not a good system.
Campus Courts and Due Process
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I completely agree with you. I mean, and there’s many cases. Let’s not get into that. But you said campus courts. And as somebody who was brought up, we were both brought up in the UK and we went to university in the UK, et cetera. I’ve never heard of a campus court that immediately rings alarm bells. Why is there a campus court? What is this?
HELEN ANDREWS: That’s right. You would think women who had some bad sexual experience, like a hookup that went wrong or anything like that, could then go to their university and say, “I, you know, that guy raped me or whatever,” and then the school would be in charge of discipline or adjudicating that case.
Now, you or I might think that if you’ve been the victim of a serious assault, you would go to the police. And that, I think, is what a lot of people recommend as a better system. But the school was required to have its own little campus courts for deciding whether or not a particular hookup had met the standard for assault. And yeah, it was a really bad system and a lot of people had their lives ruined.
Group Differences and Representation
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, coming back a little bit to your point about women being promoted partly because there’s a fear of not having enough women in your company or institution, do you not think that this ultimately goes back to the very core of the main idea that you must never utter out loud in public now in pretty much anywhere in the Western world, is that there are group differences between people, not just men and women, but generally that maybe some groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in certain fields because of cultural differences or maybe, God forbid, genetic differences or other things.
Thomas Sowell has a great bit in his last book about how almost every brewery in the world, including Ting Tao, the Chinese brewery, was founded by Germans. Right. He breaks down how in almost every great American, Latinos are more overrepresented in baseball. White people are overrepresented in hockey, black people are overrepresented in the NBA. It’s actually the standard human thing that different people have different aptitudes for different things.
But if you live in a society whose central idea is that all men are created the same, not equal, but the same, which is what we now believe, then all of this stuff follows, surely.
The Unknown Effects of Affirmative Action
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah. I think a lot of the research into group differences is really valuable. But one question that they don’t have an answer to and that no one has an answer to is one that I think we’re on the cusp of finding out, and that is how big of an effect have affirmative action programs had.
When the SFFA group filed its lawsuit against Harvard and eventually prevailed at the Supreme Court and got their Supreme Court ruling saying that Harvard may no longer use race as a factor in college admissions, when that lawsuit was ongoing, this is amazing, but nobody had an answer to the question of if you get rid of racial preferences at Harvard, will the black proportion of the freshman class go from 14% to 10%, or will it go from 14% to 2%?
I mean, you can make rough estimates of this based on things like test scores and grades, but people genuinely didn’t know, and we’re sort of seeing that play out now on various college campuses, what the effects will be. But it was amazing to think that they got rid of affirmative action in university admissions without knowing what the outcome would be.
When it comes to things like the workforce, these programs for women and for other groups have been in place for so long now, for decades really, that just like with the SFFA case, nobody knows what would happen if you got rid of them.
President Trump has gotten rid of a lot of DEI programs since the start of the year, since the start of term two, and we are just going to have to wait and see what effect that will have on the US workforce. It is way too early to tell, but there have been news stories in places like the Associated Press showing that I think the latest count is 350,000 black women have become unemployed or left the workforce since the start of the year, which is a pretty big number.
And black unemployment is going up now, even though white unemployment is stable or down. So those two are diverging in a way that they usually don’t. Now, it is way too early to attribute either of those developments to the end of DEI. It is definitely way too early to say anything like that or to even come to any conclusions at all.
But these affirmative action programs have been around for so long that nobody really knows what would happen if you got rid of them. So we don’t really know what Trump’s anti-DEI steps, what effect that will have on the American workforce.
Now to bring it back to feminization, it is my prediction that if you got rid of these thumbs on the scale, that the problem of the great feminization would take care of itself, that the demographics of a lot of these institutions would change in a way that basically the problem would solve itself.
Now, there are some people who disagree, some people who think the great feminization is here to stay. I’m willing to kind of see what happens. I think there are probably some forms of the great feminization that are here to stay. Women earn more bachelor’s degrees than men. There are more female undergraduates than male. But that’s been the case since the 1980s.
I think the female advantage in post-secondary education, that’s probably pretty resilient. I would expect that to continue to be the case. In fact, at a lot of universities they have affirmative action for men because they don’t get enough male applicants. And they know if they have a 70% female campus, nobody’s going to want to go there. So at the undergraduate level, it’s men who enjoy affirmative action.
But how would that work out in the workforce? I would anticipate that a lot of the feminization that we see now would naturally recede. But as I’ve said, nobody really knows.
Declining Birth Rates and Civilization
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And Helen, how much of this is to do with young women not having kids? And therefore their empathy has to go somewhere. It’s a controversial question because we know that women, as they have kids, they become more conservative, their priorities change, they focus more on family than they do on social issues.
HELEN ANDREWS: I have certainly met liberal women whom I would be so bold as to psychoanalyze that that is exactly what is going on. But I think the great feminization, the channeling of so many women of childbearing age into the workforce, has had two really big, potentially civilization-ending consequences.
One is the one I’ve been talking about, which is the feminization of institutions that makes them no longer function well. The other is declining birth rates. That if you have too many women too dedicated to their careers or engaged in other activities and so that they’re not having kids, that too can cause the end of your civilization.
So it’s, you know, but I feel like there are a lot of people working on the birth rate stuff. But it’s not a coincidence, I guess, is what I’m trying to say, that these two problems have arisen at the same time because they are both connected to the same phenomenon. It is a phenomenon that, like I said before, is one that no human civilization in history has ever faced. So it’s not surprising that it would yield huge, unprecedented problems. I think the falling birth rate is one of them.
Universities as Indoctrination Camps
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, and also as well, you know, we have to look at universities when it comes to this because there’s a lot of women who go into university and men. And they effectively serve as indoctrination camps. I have friends and I know people who went to Ivy League universities in this country. And what they tell me about the first couple of weeks, I’m going like, this isn’t a place of education.
You know, you have to stand up and say how you’ve been oppressed. And that is one very prestigious university in this country where everybody in the class stood up and had to identify how they are oppressed and why it affected them. And you’re going, what has this got to do with psychology?
HELEN ANDREWS: Oh, yeah, you don’t have to tell me. The first really famous woke video of the girl yelling at her college master in the courtyard because of the Halloween email. Like the master’s wife had sent out an email saying, “Everybody, Halloween is coming up. Let’s be chill about cultural appropriation. If you see a white girl wearing a sari, don’t freak out.” And a bunch of people said, “That’s really offensive.”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Bunch of people freaked out.
HELEN ANDREWS: And it culminated in a screaming match because the master of the college told people to, you know, come out and let’s talk. Let’s talk it over. And one girl just had a shrieking meltdown, dropped a lot of F-bombs, which I think is not appropriate to do in that situation.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Other people have rights too, not just walk away.
HELEN ANDREWS: “Do you understand that as your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman. You have not done that by sending out that email that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: “No, I don’t agree with that.”
HELEN ANDREWS: “Why the f did you accept the position? Who the f hired you?”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: “I have a different vision.”
HELEN ANDREWS: “You should step down. If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down. It is not about creating an intellectual space.”
KONSTANTIN KISIN: It is not.
The Yale Courtyard Incident
HELEN ANDREWS: Do you understand that? It’s about creating a home here. You are not doing that. Supposed to be our advocate. You should be at this when you hear a student say that she didn’t know how to create a safe space for a freshman in film. How do you explain that?
These freshmen come here, they think this is what Yale is. You hear that? They’re going to leave, they’re going to transfer because you are a poor steward of community. You did not sleep at night. You’re disgusting.
But the reason why that video stuck in my mind was not just that. It was one of the first sort of inaugural salvos of the Woke era. But because you could see my old college room in the background, I was like, I walked across that courtyard. That’s my courtyard. Stop desecrating it. I took it personally.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, no, absolutely. But I also feel that, you know, we talk about feminization, we really have to look at the universities because if you pump this doctrine, this ideology into people’s heads and then they go out and then spread the ideology, you have to take responsibility. We need to look at universities.
Wokeness: Ideology or Demographic Reality?
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah, I feel that. No, the reason why I disagree is that I don’t think wokeness is an ideology. And the reason why it’s important to emphasize that is because if it’s an ideology, the way we get rid of it is by having better arguments.
But if wokeness is an inevitable result of demographic feminization, if any organization or institution that has a critical mass of women is going to behave this way no matter what their ideology is, if that’s the case, then we really can’t trust that wokeness is over or will recede naturally or that better arguments will win the day.
And I see a lot of people now feel like, okay, the insanity of 2020 is over. People are no longer getting canceled left and right. Maybe the vibe shift is here and wokeness is over. And I think that is premature. I think it is going to be more resilient than that because it is connected to this demographic feminization.
The Two-Income Trap
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, very much on that. I mean, I nearly made the joke that, you know, you’re saying we shouldn’t get rid of the ideology, we should just get rid of the women. But I guess what I’m going to ask you is once you’ve got a situation where you’ve encouraged so many women into the workplace, your argument is you’ve affirmative actioned them somewhat into the workplace.
We now live in a society where even as a two income couple life is pretty hard actually, in a way that it just wasn’t for your grandparents in this country. Are you going to get the toothpaste back in the tube? Like how do you even do that?
Because as a young woman you’re not going to get married until your mid-30s, possibly just because of the way the world is. You need to make a living, you need to have a career. It’s no longer as much of an option to find a guy at 20, marry, be the homemaker and let him. Because, like, that guy’s going to have to earn a hell of a lot of money just for you to live a lower class life. Forget about a middle class life. Right.
HELEN ANDREWS: The two income trap is a serious problem.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah.
HELEN ANDREWS: And I think there are a lot of things unrelated to the gender question that we can do to address that. I think that reducing immigration would actually go a really long way to solving the two income trap and reducing some of those massive cost of living pressures that couples face.
But I have hope. I’m optimistic that the two income trap problem can be solved through appropriate policies because there are just so many forces of gravity pulling against it even now when it’s. There are so many pressures for women to stay in the workforce, even when they have kids.
Even with all of those things, most women still tell surveys that they prefer to work part time or to drop out of the workforce for a few years while their kids are young. So that’s what women still want. And the women whose husbands do earn enough tend to do exactly that.
Even really accomplished women, women with law degrees or medical degrees, almost most of them go part time at some point in their careers when they choose to have children. So there really are a lot of deeply seated human forces of gravity pulling in the direction of the mode of family that we’ve had for millennia.
So the two income trap does make it harder, but I think if we make it even just a little bit easier, people will gravitate to the older, better model.
Media and the Pursuit of Truth
KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s really interesting. The one area of your. So all of the things we’ve talked about so far you’re an expert in, and we’re not. The one area that you talked about that we sort of do know from the inside out is media. And that’s where I thought, with all possible respect, of course, that there was the most controversial claims that you made, actually.
Because one of the arguments you made is, and you’ve kind of described it already in the course of this conversation, which is about the fact that a more male institution is much more focused on the pursuit of truth, even if that means there’s conflict. People are offended and upset.
And I go, well, look at the kind of world that we’re in. We’re in new Media, we’re on YouTube, we’re in podcasting. Almost all of the people who do that are male. I go, I’m not certain that that has become an environment where the pursuit of truth is the primary goal.
It seems to me that the pursuit of clicks, the pursuit of controversy, the pursuit of the fighting has become the primary goal. So truth seems to me quite secondary. So is it really true to say that, you know, the more masculinized institutions of media are much more focused on truth than the more feminine version of it?
The news doesn’t just tell you what’s happening, it so often tells you what to think is happening. And these days the biggest red flag isn’t what’s said, it’s what gets left out.
HELEN ANDREWS: I think one of the best responses to the article that I read was by Megan McArdle, who’s a political journalist in Washington D.C. who I’ve been reading for a long time. She’s really, really great, really sharp. But she reflected on the feminization thesis and thought, well, you know, certainly there’s clearly a lot of validity there.
But the part that I liked was her anecdote of her own career in media. She said, you know that she’s been to policy dinners in D.C. where journalists and practitioners get together, and she’s been to some all female ones, deliberately all female, you know, to help the ladies advance their careers.
And she says the atmosphere is so different because at those all female dinners, when you ask somebody a question, you do that with the purpose of getting an answer and hearing what it is. If you’re at a mixed policy dinner, one where men are present, you ask a question to prove that you’re smarter than the person you’re asking the question of.
And so it is clearly true that I do not mean to lionize or paint a rosy picture of masculine modes of interaction. They are certainly not always oriented towards the pursuit of truth. But our institutions have evolved to turn male stupidity and competitiveness and silliness. I have three boys. I deal with it a lot to turn that into. To channel that towards the pursuit of truth.
So even if you are at one of the mixed policy dinners that Megan McArdle was talking about, and it’s a lot of people trying to show that they’re smarter than the other people at the end of the table, everybody else in the room learns a lot. You know, the fact that you’re trying to do that kind of one upsmanship tends to lead to a good conversation and to advance certainly with greater celerity than the all female policy dinners which I have also been at, which do tend to move really slow, because there’s a lot of compliments and telling each other how great they are.
Nothing against it. I love compliments, but, you know, it does take up a lot of time, you know.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, moving on. No, hold on, hold on, hold on. Sorry, just. Sorry to interrupt, but can we come back to this point about media? Because the broadcast scene, I just genuinely don’t think, with all respect to our fellow YouTubers and podcasters, has created an environment that is more focused on the pursuit of truth. And that, to me, is kind of the big issue with the argument you’re making. Do you have any more to say on that aspect of it?
HELEN ANDREWS: I mean, I’m not sure that the purpose of a podcast is always just the pursuit of truth. Right. At a certain level, it’s also about entertainment. It’s also about growing your audience. You know, I’ve worked at a lot of publications where you have meetings and sit down and ask basic questions like what is our purpose? And truth is a part of it and one that you always want to keep front and center. But I’m not sure it’s the only thing.
But I guess my real response is that there are definitely masculine modes of failure as well.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: So it is.
HELEN ANDREWS: It is very possible for institutions to fail in masculine, distinctively masculine ways that they would not have failed if there had been more ladies in the room. But when I look at the world around me today, I don’t see a lot of institutions failing in that way. I do see a lot of institutions failing in distinctly feminine ways.
The Disney Example
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And would you say particularly a good example of this might be something like Disney, for instance, where they produce, you know, you produce content that shall we say is hyper liberal, progressive Woke whatever way you want to describe it, no one wants to watch it. And everybody’s like, why is there a trans person in my Star Wars movie?
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah. And it doesn’t even have masculine coded stories of adventure and things like that.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Because to me, the thing that I found surprising, as somebody who loves movies, loves series, not particularly huge Star Wars fan. What I couldn’t understand is again and again, why are you producing content that the hardcore of your fan base won’t like? That to me, seems like glorified economic financial suicide.
HELEN ANDREWS: I’m not a Star Wars fan, but I have heard that. I have heard that feedback from people I know who do love Star Wars. It’s a boy franchise. Why are you making a girl movie in your boy franchise? That doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, I don’t know.
The Future of Wokeness
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. So it isn’t just Star Wars. But I guess the thing that I kind of wanted to drill down upon is we’ve talked about the peak of woke. Do you think that we’ve now coming to the end of it or do you think that it will always remain there latent because of this feminization process that you’ve described?
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah, I’m worried that it will still be there. That it’s only a matter of time before somebody whips up another moral outrage that we all have to be hysterical about. Because the way that we neutralize those kinds of mass hysteria episodes is by talking about them rationally. And if we don’t do that anymore, then we’re not going to be able to neutralize them.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: But it’s also as well, and Constantine touched on it with his argument with the podcast scene, which is basically people respond to incentives. Social media also rewards people who make histrionic, overblown, ridiculous arguments because they create the most engagement.
The Threat to Institutional Viability
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah, yeah. And I’m worried about that. And I think there are things we can do in the meantime. Right. Like I think universities today are very feminized. I think that is maybe a long term threat to their viability as institutions of the pursuit of truth. But we’re not going to turn that ship around in the next five years.
So what can we do in the immediate future? I think interim steps are always a good idea. You can have statements of academic freedom. You know, I think definitely schools should try and put those in place now so that the next time wokeness rolls around, we have tools in place to shut it down. But I think that as long as institutions remain feminized, you’re still going to have the threat will still be there.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And your treatment plan would be to end affirmative action and retain the idea that we shouldn’t discriminate against people, but assess that on the basis of whether someone’s actually been discriminated against, as opposed to the number of women you have at your company.
The Runaway Feminization of Institutions
HELEN ANDREWS: That’s right. Although in some cases that might not be sufficient medicine. I think one of the most compelling pieces of evidence to me that the great feminization is not entirely natural. It’s not just a product of women have had now had a chance to compete, and it turns out they’re better at everything. You know, it’s not just a natural result of women out competing men, which is something that a lot of feminists say, right?
They say, “Well, why is your newsroom full of ladies? Because ladies are great journalists. I don’t know what to tell you.” The piece of evidence that persuaded me that that’s not what’s going on is the way institutions tend to become more and more feminized with the passage of time.
If it were just a matter of women out competing men, you would expect institutions to reach 50/50, gender parity, and then roughly stay there if you assume that talent is equally distributed. But instead we see that institutions that reach 50% women tend to then become 52, 55, 56.
The one institution that’s way far out at the end of that process is psychology, the field of psychology. Three quarters of graduate students in psychology now are women. It is an extremely feminized field, and we see that over and over in other institutions as well, although usually not so far advanced.
As fields become feminized, what it looks like to me is they become distinctly unwelcoming to men. Because if you’re a man and you’re interested in psychology, maybe you’re interested in particular branches of psychology that tend to appeal to the male mind more like neuropsychology, the hard science stuff, whatever. But then you show up in your psychology department, and it’s a bunch of women, and they are not interested in the same aspects of psychology that you are.
They’re not willing to debate with you in the way that you think academic debate should be conducted. You just find the whole atmosphere really, really feminized. And you think, “Do I really want to spend my career here? I don’t think I do.”
Or if you, I honestly can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a male New York Times reporter during peak Woke. Like, we all caught a glimpse of the internal workings of that institution during the Barry Weiss saga when they bullied her out of her job. But it really did seem to be quite a toxic place with lots of backbiting and gossip and factions and teams and cruelty to people who work for your same employer to whom you owe a duty of basic professionalism.
So people seem not to be meeting that basic duty. And I think if you were a man, you would find all of that deeply alienating. Any human being would find that deeply alienating. So what that means is if you’re in an institution that has become feminized, it’s only going to get more feminized as men find it unwelcoming and go away.
If we now want to reverse that process, we may have to carve out little islands within psychology or journalism or wherever and say, “All right, this is going to be a safe space for men to pursue this institution or this field in a masculine way, and we’re all going to let them do that.” And it’s not going to be—
The Suppression of Dissent
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, one of the things that occurred to me as you were talking is one of the reasons an institution might carry on with this sort of runaway feminization, to borrow a term from climate change debate, is the other point you made earlier, which is that I can easily imagine being me in a New York Times editorial room, going in my head, “Well, this is all crazy. Why are we doing this?”
But if you feel the way the wind is blowing, you’re probably not going to say anything. And so the corrective mechanism that would have existed once, which is, “Guys, guys, what are we doing?” That doesn’t really exist because dissent is not part of the process. It’s not encouraged and tolerated. It’s punished and ostracized. That would sort of explain the runaway dimension of all of this, right?
HELEN ANDREWS: Definitely.
The Death of the Maverick
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, that makes sense to me. The thing that also that I worry and I’ve been talking about this quite a bit. Your mother from Venezuela. I used to be a teacher. All right. The kind of the death of the maverick, essentially, we used to see, you know, whether it was in movie making or acting or journalism and all these professions, there’d be that rebel voice which was kind of accepted and tolerated within the industry because they’d be like, “I mean, he’s kind of,” and it all frequently was a he.
“I mean, he’s kind of kooky, but sometimes, you know, he’ll say things or do things. You’ll be like, wow, that is genuinely brilliant.” And he’s the only one capable of that because he’s got this, you know, quirky, individualistic, rebel type mindset.
And my concern is with the feminization, if it’s true, and I believe it is, which values homogeneity, you’re going to eliminate those voices. And those voices or personalities are very frequently the people who drive an industry forward because they’re the ones who innovate.
HELEN ANDREWS: And it’s so hard to quantify that. Right. So when people come to me and say, “What have been the negative effects of the great feminization?” that I think is at the very top of my list, that’s one of the most important ones, that if you’ve got HR ladies planted in every single institution and who see it as their mission to get rid of exactly that maverick type of personality, there’s so much innovation that we’re missing out on, but we don’t know what would have been.
One of the cancellations that affected me very emotionally, very deeply was, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was the astronomer or astrophysicist who had just like landed a satellite on a comet or something really impressive like that. But he was wearing the T-shirt with the scantily clad ladies on it. It was like a bowling T-shirt.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: I remember this.
HELEN ANDREWS: Yeah. And somebody said, “Oh, no, he’s got scantily clad women on his T-shirt.” And they put him through a struggle session for disrespecting women. And I was thinking, “This guy just landed a satellite on a comet. Focus on that.” He’s so impressive and you’re putting him through this horrible public shaming.
But that’s the way Wokeness works. It doesn’t even register to these people that this guy has done something deeply scientifically impressive, that he might be a singular human being. For all you know, he might be the only person on the planet who could have done that. And all you care about is the shirt he’s wearing.
Mission-Driven vs. Process-Driven
KONSTANTIN KISIN: You might phrase it as, it’s not mission driven, it’s process driven.
HELEN ANDREWS: Yes.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: And I feel if you take away the male female out of this entirely, if you look at industries departments, government departments, etc. If you think about some, we, you know, we run a small business, which is what our podcast is. We only care about one thing. That’s the results. That’s the mission.
If we cared more about the process, I can immediately tell you that would make a worse product. But it’s natural. It’s the end. Of course, if you focus on the mission, you’re probably going to do everything towards the mission. If you focus on the process, the mission is secondary by nature. So I guess what you’re saying is we’ve kind of gone a little bit too far in the process direction.
HELEN ANDREWS: There’s a reason why you tend to see women underrepresented at startups, because startups of all the kinds of institutions in the world tend to be the most mission driven. They’re all focused on just one thing, getting this company up off the ground.
You start to see more female employees when it becomes a bigger institution that has an HR department and more staff and things like that. Women tend to thrive in that. But when it’s just five guys in a garage, as a matter of simple demographics and observation, we observe that there are fewer women in companies of that kind.
Closing Thoughts
KONSTANTIN KISIN: All right, Helen, one, thanks to you, we’re not hiring any more women. It’s just white men from here on in. Yeah, that’s it. It’s all about the mission. The mission is to keep a male.
Helen, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you for coming on. It’s a very interesting perspective. We’re going to go to Substack where our audience going to get ask you their questions. But before we do, we always end with the same question in our main interview, which is, what’s the one thing we’re not talking about as a society that we really should be? Falling birth rate.
Yeah, we’ve talked about that a lot on this show, but I totally agree with you. Now, other people, other people—
HELEN ANDREWS: Less enlightened people.
KONSTANTIN KISIN: Less enlightened people need to talk more about that. Thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where we’re going to ask Helen your questions. How do we let women have the same or similar opportunities as men without them being required to abandon their femininity? And how do we let men have the same opportunities as women without them being required to abandon their masculinity?
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