Are Feminized Spaces Epistemically Rotten?

Helen Andrews’ essay from some months ago on the feminization of modern institutions really made a splash, even though the basic thesis—that society’s major institutions (medical schools, academia, the judiciary, etc.) are being culturally metamorphosized by the mass influx of women—has been circulating among the very online heterodox commentariat for some time. Andrews posits that we’ve recently traversed beyond some tipping point, and that this institutional transformation is deleterious—that feminizing institutions involves re-ordering their values into something fundamentally inhospitable to their epistemic wellbeing and functionality, and that this ongoing usurpation ultimately manifests in stuff like fever-pitch wokeness and cancel culture. Here’s how Andrews contrasts male and female group dynamics:

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. 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 in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.

Some of this is observant and incisive and crucial to understanding the shifting sands of modern culture, but more scrupulous and nuanced analysis is warranted. For example, to what extent do female group dynamics really “favor consensus and cooperation,” given that they’re also supposedly enchanted with subterfuge and canceling people? Complaints about feminization are sometimes premised on women being overly caring/inclusive and other times premised on women being ruthless two-faced exclusionary psychological bullies. The mismatch is possibly resolvable: maybe female spaces are superficially cooperative and quietly Machiavellian—a dangerous admixture of smiles and backstabbing—but then discussions of female group dynamics require more nuanced specification. Others have objected to Andrews’ thesis on grounds that rightwing and hyper-masculine environments are frequently dysfunctional, too, and sometimes in ways that mirror wokeness. But all that parallel-drawing and gesturing at examples of male-group-meltdowns misunderstands the key issue, which isn’t whether male group dynamics are invariably truth-seeking, but whether truth-seeking institutions are always decidedly male.

Dan Williams had a popular essay last year arguing that truth-seeking institutions are extremely unusual and, therefore, the crumbling trustworthiness of media, science, and so on isn’t very curious or worrisome. I criticized some of Williams’ analysis and conclusions in that piece (the delicacy and rarity of truth-seeking institutions implies that we ought to cherish them and be hyper-vigilant about shoring them up, rather than waving off their downfall as an unsurprising regression to normalcy), but I also openly admitted that he had hit on something: the default state of human psychology and social cooperation isn’t geared toward clear-eyed abstract knowledge-building. Hence, the confused responses to Andrews’ essay are understandable: given how human endeavors to uncover reality typically go sideways, combing through the maladies of our modern epistemic climate and highlighting feminization seems gratuitous and misogynistic, even. But again, this insight about the specialness of epistemically virtuous human projects means that identifying and protecting the requisite conditions for their continuation is invaluable, not that we can ignore these shortcomings because they’re so commonplace.

Also, some of the feminization analysis has been careless about differentiating between female traits, virtues, foibles (and so on) and group-level characteristics. For example, writers cite how women are more nurturing or less invested in free speech than men, and it’s probably safe to extrapolate from those compositional dissimilarities to broader effects, but something like the politicking and coordination of female groups is a separable phenomenon: the aggregation of feminine traits is (subtly) distinguishable from the idea of feminine culture and group-level dynamics. Another issue is that trait selection biases should insulate subcultures from the kind of hostile evolution suggested by Andrews’ feminization thesis (viz., folks are likely to funnel into areas and institutions that seem suitable and interesting, and presumably interests covary with personality); it isn’t as if society randomly rerouted prototypical care-workers into chemical engineering or whatever, which is the misleading impression given by some of this feminization talk.

Better criticisms of Andrews-style feminization theses are available, though. For example, is it more likely that the simultaneous corruption of formerly truth-seeking institutions was achieved through seeding them with women who independently executed parallel cultural takeovers, or is it really just that corporate/intellectual vibes have been altered from the broader culture being more feminine now—society is awash with feminization trends outside of the boardroom or the faculty lounge. Also, culture is now molded via social media, which women are more adept at and more captivated by; maybe women are just more potent vectors for social media contamination rather than the standalone origin of institutional dysfunction.

Moreover, I’m pretty uncompromising in my valuation of truth, but truth-seeking isn’t even the key function of most associations or activities, so commentors fixating on the epistemic headwinds of feminization for a coterie of elite professions has been strange. Also, what about the offsetting upsides of feminization for truth-seeking? Look how science is conducted nowadays: the era of unkempt solo geniuses, rogue fin de siècle thinkers, and gentlemen scientists trading rivalrous missives and heroically carving out major headway is (mostly) in the rearview. Scientific papers are now churned out by reams of coauthors tackling more specialized and nuanced questions, culminating in modest progress.

If residual scientific headway is now reliant on social coordination and brute forcing outstanding mysteries with headcount, then conclusions about female culture being too cooperative for serious intellectual pursuits necessitates delicate rethinking. Plus, if it’s more important to solidify current knowledge than to overturn existing theories and forge breakthroughs, and maybe our intellectual energies should be aimed more toward maintenance than overturning paradigms, then it’s even conceivable the exact womanly conformism and epistemic policing that Andrews laments could be useful in preventing scientific backsliding or stamping out crackpottery. And the case for unwinding the feminization of other subcultures, where the unflinching accumulation of truth isn’t itself the group’s overarching mission, is even more dubious.

There are further problematics with the Great Feminization thesis that deserve more wholesale unpacking, but even supposing that society would benefit from preserving certain key truth-seeking institutions from feminization, it’s unclear whether those observations are actionable. An organized top-down effort to rebalance gender ratios is probably unwise/dystopian, and it’s unclear whether undoing feminization is achievable without that. Ultimately, any kind of de-feminizing project is politically and culturally unworkable and probably too costly, talent-wise: can we rely on exceptionally gifted women to persevere in masculine settings, or would de-feminizing efforts freeze out gifted women? Or, if we fail to preserve any cultural vestige of unwavering truth-seeking, then does the depth of our talent pool even matter?

Still, despite the myriad openings for sharper analysis on this stuff, most would grant that feminine clout in society has surged, and that an uptick in feminine energy would obviously reshape subcultures (a longstanding feminist argument in support of shoehorning more women into male-dominated workplaces). The troublesome and obvious question here is simply why people so uniformly presupposed that forcibly altering the milieu of masculine institutions would solely confer benefits without entailing any drawbacks—in hindsight, that attitude was naive.

In truth, while the statistics are growing so patently inauspicious that the taboo against elucidating the struggles of young men is eroding, suggestions that masculinity possesses any kind of upside remain verboten (and the public struggle to rehabilitate a positive vision for masculinity has been an embarrassing failure so far). This is doubly true for theories that men are generally superior in some respect that’s connected to high status white collar professional dealings, given that our culture esteems very little else anymore, and also feminism has long been strangely preoccupied with uneven sex ratios in a handful of exotic, ultra-high-end professional realms, so any misgivings about the feminization of those spaces will invite fiery pushback.

We cannot afford to endlessly fight old wars, though; dogmatically insisting that female cultural monopolization only presents upsides is pigheaded; more crucially, we shouldn’t even hope that it’s true, because it plainly jeopardizes the possibility of salvaging young men from the quickly enclosing grip of futility. The more credible and worrying danger isn’t that Andrews is correct and that folks will immediately misapply her feminization thesis to reinstall some retrograde sexism among venerated professions—it’s that Andrews is mostly wrong and male spaces are increasingly defunct, even in a rising tide of male hopelessness.