Here I am, yet another woman wrecking the joint

Have you heard? Women have been on the march, wrecking stuff with horrible traits like empathy.

I’ve been so busy ruining things that I barely had time to file this column. But then if I didn’t, I’d be passing up the opportunity to ruin this page again. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve dreamed of destroying the places where I toil, which is possibly why I may have been the only person actually delighted to see The New York Times run a headline asking: “Did women ruin the workplace?”

Illustration by Dionne GainCredit:

After all, I’m so ancient I remember the workplaces I first walked into as a teenager, where smoke stained the ceilings, personal assistants were called “sec-ROOT-aries” and office affairs were conducted on office chairs. Bosses openly bullied subordinates. My mechanic had pictures of naked women spreadeagled on his wall, my university lecturer was intent on mass seduction, and my local restaurant manager offered my friend a promotion for a blow job.

Who’d want to tinker with those utopias?

But first, to explain this headline. Later changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workforce?”, it accompanied a transcript of a podcast interview with columnist Ross Douthat with two conservative writers and feminist critics. Prompting this discussion was an article one of them, Helen Andrews, wrote called “The Great Feminisation”, in which she argued that workplaces have been transformed by women entering in greater numbers, leading to wokeness and the derision of male values. When women make up a substantial portion of employees, she argues, female commitment to “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” will destroy an industry from within. Boo, empathy! Yuk, cohesion!

As she said on the podcast: “The pathology in our institutions known as wokeness is distinctively feminine and feminised. And that, in a very literal sense, our institutions have gone woke because there are more women in them than there used to be.”

Women are more gossipy, more likely to be conflict-averse, Andrews believes, more emotional and less likely to tolerate behaviour like pinning porn on the walls, having push-up contests and kissing co-workers while drunk (with or without consent presumably). It’s unclear how this stuff improves productivity but Andrews reckons women have been a real downer and will somehow prevent professions from getting to “the truth”.

Her tone is panicked: “The Great Feminisation is truly unprecedented. Other civilisations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilisation in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organisations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?”

Golly. She continues: “It is still controversial, even in conservative circles, to say that there are too many women in a given field or that women in large numbers can transform institutions beyond recognition in ways that make them cease to function well.”

There is scant evidence of this malfunction. Andrews concedes more men are CEOs and in senior positions, but she cites random stats such as 60 per cent of Joe Biden’s staff having been female. She does concede that, while 80 per cent of vets are now female, this has not, as far as she knows, “had catastrophic effects”. Phew. But what about nurses? Teachers? Are those professions smoking ruins?

“The field that frightens me most is the law,” she writes. “All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” I mean … her examples are some of the hamfisted attempts on college campuses to manage sexual assault – a worthy aim, you’d imagine – but is this the best example of the law gone awry?

What about the number of perpetrators who go free? In systemic terms, what about the Jim Crow laws – designed and upheld by white men – that enforced racial segregation under America’s state and local laws as late as the 1960s?

And by woke, is she referring to diverse? Where does race come in here?

This is no small matter, Andrews says, but “a potential threat to civilisation”.

Hmmmm. Isn’t the timing of all of this curious? We have a world where political leaders have failed to address the threat of climate change, where autocracies are on the rise and wars in Sudan and Gaza have led to horrific large-scale deaths and human rights abuses, where we are galloping merrily along the path to the broad dominance of AI without fully understanding the consequences or placing proper guardrails in place, where social media is chaining our kids to screens and making them feel bleak, where the oceans are swelling with plastic and algal blooms, all presided over by mostly male leaders, and male-dominated judiciaries … but it is women who wish to work without harassment and discrimination who are threatening societal collapse?

There is a debate to be had about the DEI industry, about its efficacy and implementation, as well as the widening gap between the views of men and women, but this is not it. It’s crude, unevidenced, lacking in proportion and logic, relying on dated stereotypes.

So, what’s really going on here?

Douthat closes with this question: “Which is a better scenario: figuring out the best way for men and women to work together at work? Or having more distinctively male and female workplaces, and then men and women rejoin in the romantic or domestic sphere?”

And this is why I am writing about this thesis this week, instead of dismissing it as MAGA-fuelled trolling of professional women, lapped up by the manosphere. It is because I am increasingly seeing irrational, archaic sentiments about women expressed in public forums, along with suggestions that they should not vote, that they should stay home, look pretty, and stop wrecking things. It’s weird.

Andrews is right on one thing: feminisation is extremely rare in Western history. But do you know what isn’t? The suspicion of women, the desire to shut them up, contain them, strip their standing or authority, draw them back to the hearth, sew their lips together.

And yet, somehow, we go on, ruining the world with an insistence on respect, care and civility, day after day after day.

Julia Baird is a journalist, an author and a regular columnist. Her latest book is Bright Shining: How grace changes everything.

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