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Feminization of Institutions

Former US president Barack Obama stated at a leadership conference in Singapore in 2019: 

• “I’m absolutely confident that, for two years, if every nation on earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything — living standards and outcomes.” He added that women “are not perfect” but are “indisputably better” than men.

This influential former president of the United States categorically denigrated one gender, claiming the other to be superior, more virtuous, and better leaders. He presents women’s superiority not merely as his own opinion, but as an “indisputable" fact. Imagine that the genders were reversed and that Mr. Obama had instead stated that “men are ‘not perfect’ but ‘indisputably better’ than women.” Would such statements fail to attract calls for deplatforming and immediate and unconditional  reputation by political leaders, and the ethics and activist groups? Would the speaker fail to be denounced as sexist, a bigot, a purveyor of hate speech, and even a gender supremacist?

The response to vastly milder statements suggesting that men may be more successful in some roles has been swift and punitive. Harvard president Larry Summers was pushed out of his position over discussion of data regarding men and women in the sciences reflecting mainstream and uncontroversial sociological data. His critics did not even attempt to dispute him on the facts. They misrepresented his statements and persevered in their coordinated campaign even after an official recording proved their representations false.

Yet no one called Mr. Obama a bigot or demanded for him to be deplatformed. There was no media scandal demanding firings and leadership change at outlets that sympathetically covered his remarks. No activists demonstrated for his associates to be ostracized and for businesses that donated to his foundation to be boycotted. Rather, Mr. Obama’s remarks were defended by CNBC and other media outlets with virtually no pushback. Obama was lauded as a courageous and empowering speaker of truth. That Mr. Obama’s screed passes as acceptable discourse demonstrates, as evolutionary psychologist Rollo Tomassi observed, the female primary culture of western society. Female nature is viewed as inherently good and virtuous. Men and masculinity are viewed as pathologic.

Is it “indisputable,” as Mr. Obama claimed, that women are better and that female leadership leads to “better outcomes across the board on just about everything?” Where are the so-called “fact-checkers” – Politifact, Snopes, Glenn Kessler of the WaPo, and others, who are so eager to call out any purported misstatement by even mildly conservative political figures? Is the key to a just, peaceful, and prosperous society to defenestrate men from positions of authority and appoint women? If true, this would be a tremendously valuable insight that societies around the world would be highly incentivized to implement. In a harsh, competitive world in which small advantages often make the difference for a people’s prosperity and survival, why was not this sage insight discovered millennia ago? Where are the worked models of these wondrous matriarchal societies that prospered and thrived in a harsh world?

What Are the Outcomes of Feminized Institutions?

Researcher Helen Andrews observes in The Great Feminization that female-dominated institutions differ in certain qualities and outcomes. They prioritize "empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.” Mr. Obama’s statements acknowledge that differences between men and women are real and not merely constructs of societal conditioning. Leftist claims not to know what a woman is are dissimulation. The greater propensity of women for leftist ideology is well known to political scientists and operatives. Of judges appointed by the Biden Administration, 63% were women. That feminist groups laud the milestones of the first woman running for or elected to various positions only when the woman is a leftist, but disregard it for centrists and conservatives, suggest that the interest is not in the empowerment or equality of women per se, but on gender as a proxy for leftist ideology.

The US educational system is the most prominent feminized societal institution, having long been run and been run and substantially controlled by women. Nowhere are the results of feminization more apparent. Teachers unions have coopted schools into institutions of indoctrination, taking anti-student and anti-parent stances while failing at their primary mission of education. Teachers unions are primarily distinguished for their political activism supporting far-left causes even while failing at their primary mission of education. Teachers unions have abused their positions of influence to circumvent the democratic process with unilateral demands unrelated to their educational mission. Nowhere is the mantra of “100% authority, 0% accountability” as apparent as in teachers unions, for whom the answer to failing educational outcomes is always more demands for taxpayer money, even while protecting and empowering incompetent teachers and administrators.

Andrews notes that the impact of feminization is innocuous in some fields, like veterinary medicine, where there is excellent service and good outcomes. In other fields, feminization has transformed the institution’s dynamics and outcomes achieved. She expresses concern for the feminization of law schools and judgeships, given women’s greater focus on social dynamics over the text for the law. In universities, women are on average more supportive of enforced conformity to social goals and much less supportive of free speech and dispassionate search for objective truth than their male colleagues.

In the dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell observed that “it was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” Numerous demographic surveys and studies have found a wide political gender difference between men and women, and especially between young men and young women.

Rollo Tomassi writes that the drive for assured security is part of women’s evolutionary firmware, and that women are much more concerned about their security than men. The appeal of the welfare state and social programming to women, who are its primary beneficiaries, is far greater than for men.

Female hypergamy has implications in the political realm, where women are far more inclined to vote on the basis of emotionally compelling narratives and their sense of entitlement and group interests, in contrast to rational and factual analysis. The heavy preponderance of women, especially young women, who support far-left politics and socialism reflects this. Socialist policy platforms closely parallel hypergamous female entitlement. Is it a coincidence that socialist platforms, deriving not from rigorous analysis of real-world history, experience, and validated principle, but from utopian fantasy, are far more attractive to the average female than male psyche? They appeal to short-term emotional thinking with no consideration of costs and consequences, trade-offs and feasibility. The correlations are sufficiently close that commentators including Helen Andrews have observed that institutional feminization is virtually synonymous with woke culture.

The evolved psychology of female entitlement includes the strong desire for provision and security with no felt need to provide reciprocal value, and being “hard-wired” to seek maximal resource extraction from men (typically without regard for resource availability or constraints). These are likely significant factors in women being the primary constituency supporting welfare-state socialism in almost all Western democracies. The problem arises in the transmigration of feminine wants from the context of personal relationships with a spouse or boyfriend, where they face resource constraints, to the welfare state, where they are perceived as being unconstrained by resource availability and without need for reciprocal exchange. This has facilitated ballooning and unsustainable national debt.

There are many libertarian and conservative women and many leftist men. But in aggregate, men are more supportive of national defense and economic freedom, whereas women in aggregate tend to be more supportive of income distribution schemes and special privileges for various mascot groups which trigger projected feelings of maternal empathy.

Author J. Stone observed that feminization of institutions has included “less affinity for traditional, constitutionally protected forms of confrontation in the legal and political spheres, i.e., less support for open debate, free-speech rights, and ‘due process of law.’” In “Mistresses of Misrule,” he notes unintended consequences that have arisen from feminist-supported policies based in short-term emotional thinking. Some of his examples include:

• “New, lenient policing and sentencing laws. Short-term goal: Stop police oppression of African-Americans. Long-term effects: Incentivization of law-breaking, rampant crime, business flight.

• Generous welfare policies. Short-term goal: Treat the disadvantaged with compassion, reduce hunger, etc. Long-term effects: Incentivization of indigency, spread of welfare dependency, impairment of family-formation (mothers lose incentive to marry), plus all the social pathologies that follow from these.

• Opposition to restrictions on immigration. Short-term goal: Help the ‘huddled masses.’ Long-term effects: Incentivization of mass/illegal immigration. Destruction of national identity, lowering of trust, increase in despair, price inflation, brain-drain in origin countries, etc.

• Restriction of speech, debate, legal due-process, scientific inquiry. Short-term goal: Prevent the emotional turmoil caused by “hateful” arguments, concepts, or simple observations, e.g., of racial differences in cognitive and behavioral traits. Long-term effects: Destruction of liberal norms, a maternal “because I said so!” illiberalism, corruption of scientific culture, reversal of scientific progress.”

• Promotion of equal outcomes vs. equality of opportunity. Short-term goal: Reduce conflict and promote fairness by directly reducing financial inequality (resembling a classic maternal strategy for promoting harmony among children). Long-term effects: Destruction of normal, healthy incentives to succeed. Promotion of lazy, redistributive attitude. A centerpiece of communism/socialism and a key reason for its failure.”
  From “Mistresses of Misrule.”

J. Stone noted: “Not every social change driven by this ‘Great Feminization’ process has been adverse, but it does seem that most have—and that the net effect is increasingly dystopian.”

The ability for both men and women to pursue the full range of education, career, and leadership opportunities in modern Western democracies is wonderful. The consequences of marked changes in the gender dynamics and representation in societal institutions, however, can have major impacts on the impact and function of these institutions. We welcome continued evaluation and analysis of these topics, and increasing public awareness and discussion.