Could it be true that women are to blame for cancel culture?
Andrews, a social conservative, would likely say that proves her point – her point being that our increasingly feminised society is to blame for wokeness and the undermining of our institutions.
Fortunately, we’re not in the business of mollycoddling readers.
Still, let’s take this slowly by starting with the safe leftish orthodoxy when discussing sexual differences.
Estonia’s first female prime minister said once that more female leaders would mean less violence.
Presumably she meant fewer wars. She forgets that Maggie Thatcher’s swift and decisive defence of the Falklands after Argentina invaded defined her leadership.
Jacinda Ardern has built a post-political career on assuring us people are seeking more kindness and empathy from their leaders.
Neither trait sorted out her country’s rising inflation or the doubling of mortgage rates facing New Zealanders.
We’ve been programmed to lionise female attributes – and criticise male attributes. How many times do we read about the wicked “boys’ club” in a week?
There is another view. In a piece published in online magazine Compact last week, Andrews set out a different take on the feminisation of society.
It’s not a good thing, she says, that the workplace is replacing male attributes with female ones. In short, women are too woke to run our institutions.
She’s not alone, by the way, in turning the tables and suggesting men are better in leadership positions.
Andrews says her epiphany came in 2019 after reading an article about Harvard president Larry Summers.
Cancel culture
Summers was forced to resign in 2006 after suggesting “issues of intrinsic aptitude” might partly explain the under-representation of women in the upper levels of science and engineering.
A woman who complained said when Summers started talking about innate sex differences, she “couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill”.
“Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organisation or field,” Andrews writes, in agreement with the article about the downfall of Summers.
“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behaviour applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?”
She said she was thrilled with her discovery.
I say she’s misconceived, in important respects.
But first to her claims that feminisation explains why emotion and politics rather than logic and evidence have apparently triumphed in Western public life.
Some of Andrews’ observations about how women, generally speaking, do things differently to men is not off the mark. The emphasis is on “generally speaking”.
She says wokeness prioritises “the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”.
And “Female group dynamics favour consensus and co-operation. Men order each other around but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated … men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracise their enemies.”
Are you cringing in recognition at these behavioural differences?
If so, then maybe we can agree that some men and some women sometimes behave differently to the opposite sex.
But Andrews starts to go off the rails when she asserts that feminisation is the cause of the politicisation of professions, from medicine and academia to the media and business.
What frightens Andrews most is the feminisation of the law, where women have been pouring out of law schools in greater numbers than men, moving into law firms, the Bar, courts, law reform commissions and prosecutor’s offices. “To be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” Andrews writes.
She predicts that a feminised legal system might look something like Title IX processes for sexual assaults established at American universities during the Obama era.
The Kavanaugh case
Andrews is right that the safeguards that apply in the legal system didn’t apply in Title IX proceedings on campus, leading to ridiculous situations where those accused of sexual assaults were not told who their accusers were.
Andrews points to the poisonous confirmation hearings of US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh as a sign of what happens when women call the shots.
A “masculine position” is to say that if there is not enough evidence, then claims by Christine Blasey Ford – that she was sexually assaulted by Kavanagh when they were teenagers – must not ruin his career as a jurist.
The “feminine position”, says Andrews, was that “her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect”.
What happened to Kavanagh was wrong.
A small group of women was determined to keep him off the Supreme Court. But was it driven by a feminine position or a political one?
The growing derision for fundamental legal principles concerns me, too. God knows I have reported and commented at length on the worst excesses of Australia’s legal system – some at the hands of women.
Our first female Chief Justice of the High Court, Susan Kiefel, was wrong to judge and publicly execute (in a reputational sense) former justice Dyson Heydon for alleged harassment.
Heydon had denied the allegations. There was no trial, only an internal review that Heydon did not participate in.
The result – Heydon’s removal – may have been emotionally satisfying to many people, especially some women, but was it legally rigorous?
Like many lawyers, I worry that feeling good overrides good process in our legal system these days.
Federal Court Chief Justice Debra Mortimer, for example, has had her photo taken with native title litigants. This may endear the Federal Court to native title claimants and their supporters, but those defending these claims in the future may not feel so loved.
This newspaper has reported on a string of cases in which judges have accused the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, run by Sally Dowling, of running baseless sexual assault prosecutions that have no hope of securing a conviction. This push for “victim-centric justice” – even before the law has ruled that there is, on the evidence, a victim – may hearten alleged complainants.
However, we should ask whether it also has every prospect of damaging the lives of men who should be presumed innocent.
Problem transcends the sexes
Wokeness, to use the common catch-all phrase, has a more serious and negative impact in some fields – like the law – where it has encouraged a growing disdain for, and ignorance of, fundamental legal principles.
But this is not simply feminisation at work – the problem transcends the sexes.
Plenty of male lawyers, many of them senior silks and heads of legal institutions, are complicit in this crisis of confidence in fundamental legal principles.
When an issue of major legal importance pops up challenging the value of, say, the presumption of innocence or equality under the law, they are nowhere to be seen.
Men are not cowering because the law is feminised; they are an inherent part of the problem. We saw that with the voice.
Andrews doesn’t address the role that politics as a new form of morality – and practised by both sexes – has played in the decline of our institutions.
According to the 2021 census, almost 40 per cent of Australians say they have no religion, an increase from 30 per cent in 2016 and 22 per cent in 2011. People will, however, find their moral codes elsewhere.
For an increasing number of Australians, in all walks of life including the law, it appears to be in politics.
Political debates have become a battle between good and bad.
When there are no churches to practise one’s faith, adherents of this politics-as-morality secular religion take it into the workplace, into schools and universities, on to social media.
It’s said that the best way to sharpen our ideas and thinking is to read material we disagree with. That’s true.
But it is equally true that honing our thoughts can come from reading something we think we might agree with – only to disagree with it because it forced us to think some more. That’s what Andrews’ piece did for me.
Andrews says “the problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminised, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?”
I am receptive to Andrews’ arguments.
But not in agreement.
If anything, her claims convinced me that only on a lazy day could I get on board with the idea that women are responsible for our woke society.
It’s easy. It’s neat.
The rise of the teals in Australia is, after all, largely a female-driven phenomenon, and most of the teals fall squarely inside the woke framework that might broadly be defined as “caring” and talking endlessly about everything under the sun.
In business, the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, led by prominent female leaders Debby Blakey and Louise Davidson, played an out-size role in foisting ESG mania on listed companies.
This contributed to the unplugged wokedom that helped unravel the Australian Securities Exchange’s Corporate Governance Council last week.
But neat and simple answers won’t do, even if they appear thrilling.
Feminisation might be a small part of it because some women have decided to pursue other agendas within these institutions.
Tripping into wokedom
But it’s equally evident that plenty of men are hellbent on turning their backs on truth in the lecture room or are too afraid to make enemies to be great journalists or are mediocre compliance types rather than brave corporate leaders.
I tripped into wokedom, unexpectedly, in the late 1990s, before there was a word for it. I didn’t go looking for trouble. I only wanted to find the best way to teach my first child, who was about three years old, how to read.
I came across something called “literacy for social justice”. That’s what its proponents called it. This was mainstream literacy teaching. It assured us that kids would learn to read, indeed become critical readers pushing back against the power structures of the oppressive West, by showing them whole words, rather than using traditional phonetic methods – or direct instruction – by teaching kids the sounds that make up words.
“Literacy for social justice” may well be the single biggest reason for Australia’s falling literacy rates.
Even in a profession that has been predominantly female for many decades, this literacy for social justice bunkum was very much the brainchild of male academics, most prominently an academic named Brian Cambourne.
Here’s Cambourne in an interview published in 2001: “This view of literacy (for social justice) sees literacy as inherently political in several ways. For example, it assumes that in our society … there are groups and individuals who are constantly engaged in acquiring more and more power and wealth at the expense of others … A related assumption is that language can be used to either include or exclude people or groups of people from different kinds of power and rewards.”
Mistaking generalisations for facts
The modern battle to dislodge or dilute traditional concepts, be it how to teach a kid to read, or who owns corporations, or whether we should respect the presumption of innocence, or abide by the rule of law, is fundamentally one about power that very often transcends gender.
Andrews’ diagnosis of the cause of woke agendas suffers from the very problem she describes. It mistakes generalities for facts. Could it be that Andrews has fallen hook, line and sinker for identity politics – it’s just that her chosen group of wicked (and woke) oppressors are women? When it comes to human beings, generalisations are superficially attractive but also frequently wrong. Much better to judge people on their individual characteristics rather than on characteristics they might be presumed to have by virtue of their membership of some collective group.
Women, in particular, have suffered greatly from generalisations based on their sex. Now that we have, in large part, won the battle not to be judged as an indistinguishable collective rather than as individuals, we should take great care not to inflict the same error on ourselves. Women open the door to reductive claims about women when we make reductive claims about men. Phrases like “toxic masculinity”, “mansplaining” and the like should be retired – or at least relegated to comedy skits.
In the end, the biggest problem with Andrews’ claims is that her suggested fix lacks logic. Andrews says we can turn the “Great Feminisation” project around if we return to fair rules, for example, by employing people based on merit – rather than blindly following anti-discrimination diktats that every workplace be feminised.
We do need to revert to fair rules. I love merit. But this won’t necessarily fix the problem as described by Andrews.
If Andrews thinks female academics are less interested in the truth, and female journalists are less interested in making enemies to get the big story, and female lawyers are less interested in legal principles that underpin our society, and so on, then surely the logical conclusion is that we need to have fewer women in these fields to ensure the best outcomes.
That is crazy – it amounts to a new form of discrimination.
But employing fewer women is the logical end point if one genuinely believes that women have different traits to men that lead to worse outcomes. A greater focus on appointing people – men and women – on individual merit, according to their professional skills, and ignoring their sex or their politics will improve our institutions.
It will help weed out sloppy thinking driven by wishy-washy political agendas – among men and women.
I am not a fan of Kiefel’s treatment of Heydon, Mortimer’s choice of photo opportunities, Dowling’s office launching doomed prosecutions, or of the relentless do-gooding of female-led ACSI and HESTA.
But those things are errors of judgment by individuals, not of womankind.
Just as readers who disagree with this column should blame what they regard as errors on me, not on my sex.
Born to rule, but nobody’s fool: the odyssey of politics’ great survivor
If we were in the business of trigger warnings, this column would start as follows: many women – and some men – may need a quiet room with puppies and Play-Doh after reading The Great Feminisation by American commentator Helen Andrews.