Which of the following represents the most consequential date in the history of the current century: 15 September 2008; 11 March 2020; 11 September 2001; 24 February 2022; or 14 January 2005? Stumped by the final option? It is, according to conservative commentator Helen Andrews, the day the world changed. It was the opening act of a new and perhaps final chapter in the chronicles of humanity. The rulebook of civilisation was torn asunder and an anarchic force of destabilisation unleashed – a force whose power remains unchecked and which threatens to undermine the rule of law, criminalise the pursuit of liberty, obliterate the value, nay the very meaning, of truth itself. What fateful yet mysterious cataclysm provoked such apocalyptic transformation? On 14 January 2005, Larry Summers gave a speech.
This speech, despite the speaker’s status as one-time chief economist of the World Bank (1991-93), treasury secretary of the United States (1999-2001) and later director of that nation’s Economic Council (2009-10), did not concern itself with matters economic. Instead, Summers, then president of Harvard University, shared his opinions with members of that institution on the difference in “intrinsic aptitude” between men and women for research positions in the hard sciences. There was firm but polite pushback from the audience. In the subsequent days, several articles recounting, and criticising, his – off-the-record – argument were published. Summers apologised, qualified his remarks, then, after a vote of no confidence from the university board, resigned. The first cancellation had occurred.
From this moment, Andrews argues in an article titled “The Great Feminisation”, published in October by the online American magazine Compact (a publication committed to publishing both left and right populist opinions), most if not all contemporary social ills can be traced and, through it, understood. A mob of female hysterics was empowered by Summers’s defenestration, and a new mode of social engineering was invented in the form of the public cancellation, a constitutively feminine act which has subsequently mutated into a generalised “wokeness” that now threatens society at large. Andrews describes the explanatory force of this thesis as “incredible”, capable of unlocking “the secrets of the era we are living in”. Wokeness, she explains, is not an “outgrowth of Marxism”, nor an expression of “disillusionment” in the lack of social and political change experienced under Obama, but, “simply”, the result arrived at when “feminine patterns of behaviour” are “applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently”.
What does a “feminine pattern of behaviour” look like when it’s at home? Conveniently for Andrews it’s “everything you think of as wokeness”: the prioritisation of “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”. This essential sex difference, Andrews believes, expresses itself most critically in attitudes to conflict, which men “wage openly while women covertly undermine or ostracise their enemies”. Andrews isn’t directly disparaging of women for being this way – it isn’t our fault that we’re biologically weak and sneaky – but is fearful for the consequences if women continue to increase their share of powerful professional positions because “female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions”. Men are “driven away” by feminine norms of behaviour and when this happens, values such as truth, justice and objectivity depart with them, Andrews claims. Wokeness, then, begins at work. Andrews is far from the only one to make this claim, but she is one of an isolated few who attribute the cultural shift directly to biologically ingrained characteristics in women.
Andrews’s article is an extension of a speech (with the same title) she delivered to the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC on 2 September. The video of the speech has since gathered almost 250,000 views on YouTube, making Andrews the most recent embodiment of a now very familiar phenomenon: the woman brave enough to stand up and denounce all other women. Some of the viral interest in her argument can surely be attributed to the salivation provoked by the promise of a catfight – her NatCon appearance has the air of a Camille Paglia impersonator slowly realising she’s been stood up by her Susan Sontag double. But her hypothesis is powerful enough to have generated significant numbers of considered responses across mainstream liberal media – replies have been published in the Atlantic and Vanity Fair, by bloggers including Matthew Yglesias and Kelly Chapman, and on 6 November the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat hosted Andrews on his popular podcast Interesting Times, where she defended her position. To have triggered such a reaction, something in her argument must have struck a nerve, or seemed capable of describing a truth about the world in which we live today.
While Andrews, as she put it in her podcast appearance, is keen to focus on wokeness as “the problem that we’re trying to solve”, I wager that her thesis on this topic is not what has grabbed most people’s attention – a critique of woke ideology and cancel culture is, in late 2025, hardly innovative. Rather, the most intriguing element of Andrews’s argument is what she (mis)identifies as the cause of this cultural turn: the mass entry of women into professional roles in the workforce, and the subsequent “feminisation” of public life.
For this, Andrews provides a litany of facts and figures that, unlike her speculations on the feminine plague of wokeness, are hard to dispute: today, 33 per cent of American judges are women, as is 55 per cent of the staff of the New York Times (we might note that two individuals among the remaining 45 per cent – Douthat and the columnist David French – were early responders to Andrews’s provocations). Meanwhile, medical schools in the US are now “majority female”, as is the country’s college-educated workforce. Incontrovertible facts, demonstrating a feminisation of (American) society, but why stop there?
In the past 40 or so years, women have become the heads of many of the world’s largest nations, most powerful institutions and influential political movements. Ursula von der Leyen heads the executive wing of the EU. Giorgia Meloni leads one of its key economies. Finland and Germany have both had female heads of state for significant periods since the turn of the century, as have New Zealand, Argentina and Brazil, as does Switzerland today. In the UK, four leaders of the once-hegemonic Conservative Party have been women, three of whom have also been prime minister. In France, Marine Le Pen regularly seems on the brink of moving into the Elysée. And the once socially conservative Ireland has just elected its third female president. The US has had both a female secretary of state and vice-president, and Mexico is now a little over a year into its first period of female rule.
It’s curious that Andrews doesn’t bolster her argument with such cases, but her reluctance to do so is explicable once you grasp that her intention is not to explain something that has already happened, but rather to fearmonger about what is yet to come.
The mode of Andrews’s argumentation is paranoid-conspiratorial: women are slowly taking over the world (by which she actually means professional managerial roles within America), and with it, eroding the values of Western civilisation. If, as Andrews argues, the consequence of this feminisation is the emasculation of society, and if, as she says, women are biologically less cut out for leadership because they prefer complimenting each other to warmongering, then, given the number of women who have for so long occupied leading roles in political and economic life, why doesn’t the world look and feel, well, a bit nicer? This far into feminisation, oughtn’t its effects have been felt further than in the spread of “woke” culture (a phenomenon, certainly, but not one that seems to have much purchase on the profit-seeking activities of multinationals with female CEOs, nor the foreign policy and trade disputes of nation states as helmed by women)?
If women are as conflict averse and prone to self-serving initiatives as Andrews makes out, why has Nato not been replaced with a Transatlantic Safe Space, the World Bank not initiated a reparations programme for emotional labour, or the United Nations not committed itself to airdropping tampons across borders? Less fatuously, why has the phenomenal rise in the number of women in British political life done nothing to stymie rising maternal mortality rates in the country? Why do women still earn between 16 and 20 per cent less than their male peers across the world? Why have traditionally “feminine” problems such as affordable housing and childcare not been solved through women’s representation at the highest levels of power, but in fact worsened during the same time that women have become increasingly politically powerful? These are real and important questions, but not ones Andrews is interested in addressing.
Instead, her main concern is the effect of feminisation on the rule of law, which, she fears “will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female”. This is because laws are made to be followed, “even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic”. For someone so worried about the threat posed by feminisation to legal legitimacy, she seems to have a strange idea of how discrimination law, in particular, works in practice. It is not, as she claims, “mandatory” to have equal representation of women in corporate management; it is difficult to imagine the kind of statute that would, as she hopes for, “make it legal to have a masculine office culture again” given no such thing has, in fact, been outlawed, even in the US. Andrews doesn’t go into how a masculine office culture might be codified, but that’s not the point: the point is that its criminalisation sounds like something that might plausibly happen in the near future. Why is that?
One reason is a bias towards culture wars issues in popular forms of media reporting over the same period as the “feminisation” has occurred (roughly since 1980). A recent paper by the economists Shakked Noy and Aakaash Rao, from MIT and Harvard respectively, shows how cable news channels “poached” viewers from traditional broadcasting by emphasising incendiary cultural issues over less salubrious coverage of the economy. John Burns Murdoch, the Financial Times’s chief data reporter, combined these insights with those of another paper from University of Chicago researchers on similar dynamics within social media to show how the previously uniquely American experience of political polarisation, as expressed through cultural issues, has spread “across the West”. Andrews may not be describing reality correctly, but she is describing new media trends with great accuracy, and recycling their approach: an increasing focus on inflammatory cases at the expense of more fine-grained economic analysis.
Another reason is that workplace complaint culture is indeed on the rise, but not solely among women and not solely because of issues related to sexual discrimination. The multiple rapid shocks to employment conditions caused by the pandemic, the introduction – and then abandonment – of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives, and AI-induced lay-offs, along with a reinvigorated union movement has re-politicised the workplace along a number of axes in the last half-decade. In the US, harassment cases rose from six to 15 per 1,000 employees last year, according to recent reporting by a HR firm. This has been accompanied by a rise in the number of HR roles in the corporate world – a 64 per cent increase over ten years in the US, the Economist reports – as companies try to find ways to mitigate competing demands between different groups of workers within existing legal frameworks without losing money. Given much of the global corporate world runs on a US model, this liberal legalism is quickly exported to other countries through short-sighted initiatives that target employees’ negative feelings about their exploitation, rather than improving the actual conditions of their labour. Put simply: men complain about work too, but for Andrews this feminises them because to complain is always female.
What Andrews presents as a description of the present is in fact a dog whistle for the future: keep going along this path, she says, and we’ll end up in a thoroughly feminised world in which talk takes precedence over action. Ironically, given Andrews’s dislike for emotive reasoning, this is an argument which draws its power from a feeling – things are getting harder for men – and then extrapolates to a falsifiable observation – because women are taking over. The seductive element of her logic comes from its resemblance to the truth, without actually being true. Things are getting harder for men, as they are for the workforce generally, in which men constitute a decreasing majority of high-status white-collar jobs. This is not, however, because of a great feminine conspiracy but rather because of a set of legal patches that sought to try to equalise prospects for women in a certain set of professional roles, in a certain type of country.
The principal reason for this attempted social-cultural equalisation of the Western workplace was not, as Andrews believes, primarily a response to women’s complaints, though feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s certainly inspired some later policy proposals. It was a way of drawing more women into the labour pool to help Western economies – above all the US – compete with the growing productive power of rising economies such as China and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. The Western workplace feminised because Western capitalism needed more workers to survive, and women were a handily available source once a few tweaks to the existing models of employment were made. These tweaks had social consequences, however, because they promised to do the impossible: to make capitalism fair.
Capitalism, though, is not fair. Nor can it be made to be so. Under such a system, political power concentrates in the hands of those who control production and investment, whatever their gender – or race, or sexuality. The entry of more women into the workforce has certainly increased the number of women with political and economic power but it hasn’t changed the fundamental logic of capitalist societies, as modern British history has amply proved. And wokeness, at least in the workplace, wasn’t created by women trying to create an unfair advantage for themselves within these capitalist societies; it is the epiphenomenal consequence of US-led globalised capitalism promising, then failing to deliver, “fairness” through identitarian policy initiatives offered up to replace historic forms of collective organising. Workers – first industrial and then professional – have been pitted against each other, made to compete for ever smaller slices of the pie, rather than demanding, as a group, more of a share from capital.
This argument isn’t particularly inflammatory, but it does have the virtue of being true. It leaves one question unanswered, though: if women aren’t to blame for wokeness, who is? Here we might profitably return to the fateful events of 14 January 2005. Were one looking for a candidate at whose feet to lay the invention of wokeness, understood as a cultural byproduct of the tensions caused by increased global economic competition during the 1990s, Larry Summers – as a former US Treasury secretary – is not, in fact, a bad shout. As a woman, and therefore someone who is naturally risk averse, I say we err on the side of caution: cancel him.
[Further reading: Olivia Nuzzi and the death of mystery]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes