As American liberal intellectuals grapple with existential questions such as the survival of the republic and of liberal democracy, their conservative peers are turning their attention to what they see as a much more pressing problem: the number of women in professional jobs.
No, really. Last month, the influential conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, sparked some controversy by hosting a discussion provocatively titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” After much criticism, this was softened (a bit) to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”, inadvertently providing a useful translation of what US conservatives mean when they complain about “feminism”.
This discourse may not seem intellectually serious—and it isn’t—but that doesn’t mean it won’t make it to our shores. The United States is still, for good or ill, the cultural powerhouse of the world. Much of the rhetoric of the UK’s populist right draws overtly from its American counterpart, as does the response to it.
And the US panic over working women, the idea that higher education and professional workplaces are becoming too feminised, has been in the ether there for some time. American conservatism in its online form, designed for mass appeal, often refers to this idea with the shorthand of “the longhouse”, a term that refers to a women-only space in indigenous societies. Conservatives believe that Americans are all living in “the longhouse”—or under broader female social norms. American cultural conservatives have always visually represented their opponents as female, effeminate or queer. You’ll probably have seen the “triggered feminist” memes—a photograph of an angry-looking woman with short hair and glasses. Increasingly, however, the anti-women images of the right simply show ordinary women doing office jobs, the subtext being that there is something wrong and infuriating about professional women.
In its more upmarket form, designed for elite capture, American conservatism has built a faux-intellectual theory to explain this general feeling that something is amiss. The core assertion of that argument is that evolution (and/or history, it’s not always clear) has given women different communication and conflict strategies and, given that women now have leadership roles in many major institutions, they are changing them for the worse. A version of this reasoning was published in October by Compact magazine, and written by the journalist Helen Andrews, who was one of the guests on Douthat’s podcast. In “The Great Feminization” Andrews argues that men “developed group dynamics optimized for war” and women for “protecting their offspring”.
Men being built for war makes them more direct, more comfortable with conflict, but also able to more quickly reconcile, she writes: “The point of war is to settle disputes between two tribes, but it works only if peace is restored after the dispute is settled. Men therefore developed methods for reconciling with opponents and learning to live in peace with people they were fighting yesterday.” Women, conversely, tend to be less direct, more emotional, more likely to hold grudges. These “female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.”
Biological essentialism is nothing new for the US right. The Canadian psychologist turned self-help guru Jordan Peterson, who—for all his strangeness—is probably the most significant conservative public intellectual of the Trump era, came to greater international prominence in 2018 following a viral exchange in which he argued that the gender wage gap was a result not of discrimination but of women having different personality styles and capacities. Peterson has long held that men and women have essentially different psychology and that throughout history they have self-selected into roles that match it. The thrust of this—let’s call it the “feminisation narrative”—is that modern society, uniquely in history, is casting men and women into unnatural roles and that’s why everything is awry.
Like many who fetishise history, advocates of the feminisation narrative imagine an utterly ahistoric past, populated exclusively by medieval warrior men and 20th-century housewives, in which no one grew the food or wove the clothes. Paradoxically, the modern liberalism that US conservatives rail against provides more opportunity than there has ever been at any point in history for men to be warriors, or women to be caregivers, if that is what they want to be. It’s just that given the freedom to choose, most do not.
Still, the many centuries of male dominance over power has left an ideological residue. There is a good deal of data to suggest we still see women (often subconsciously) as less trustworthy and less authentic than men. That we judge them much more negatively for seeking power or question their abilities more aggressively. The incoherence between formal structures and implicit attitudes can create a cognitive dissonance. This is what the feminisation narrative exploits.
Put simply, many (mostly men, and some women) have a vague, unquantifiable sense that something has gone wrong amid the dramatic revolution in gender roles over the past 100 years. Educational and employment structures are generating outcomes that our biases are telling us don’t seem right. People are increasingly told what to do by women, and that grates on many in a way a man exercising the same authority does not.
Much of the feminisation narrative is little more than sexist stereotyping (women are catty; women are indecisive; women are not intellectual) dressed up in sweeping allusions to a pre-historic past. Take Andrews’s thoughts on more women training as lawyers and judges. “The field that frightens me most is the law,” she writes. She doubts that it can survive becoming majority female, because law requires confrontation, directness, rationality and so on. A woman-dominated legal profession would descend into gossip and groupthink. Her evidence that this will happen is the record of Title IX courts in the US, which uphold the prohibition on federal institutions discriminating against people on the basis of sex. She also cites the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, during which Christine Blasey Ford, now a professor, accused him of attempting to rape her when they were students.
If you’re failing to see the connection, Andrews explains: “The masculine position was that, if Christine Blasey Ford can’t provide any concrete evidence... her accusations of rape cannot be allowed to ruin his life. The feminine position was that her self-evident emotional response was itself a kind of credibility that the Senate committee must respect.”
Of course, a single case does not define an entire field of law, and this particular case was not even a legal one—confirmation hearings are a political process. Andrew claims that Ford did not provide evidence, but her witness testimony would constitute a form of evidence in a court of law. (Additionally, if I were to pick an example of female emotionality and male rationality, I wouldn’t choose one where the woman calmly relayed her side of the story, while the man cried, shouted, became red-faced, and implied a senator questioning him had problems with alcohol).
In the real world, women lawyers and judges move through cases with the same efficiency as men. Women aren’t “ruining work”, as the New York Times put it, what’s happening is that, as professions are seen as feminine or female-dominated, there is a greater hostility to them. A male boss who is telling you how to do your job is merely exercising his natural authority. Meanwhile, the (overtly female) stock character of an “HR Lady” doing the same is a sign of everything that’s wrong with the world. Just think of the characterisation of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, as “Rachel from accounts”.
Many readers would interject here that the UK isn’t going to descend into a full-blown moral panic about women lawyers, that we aren’t the US. Different countries are indeed different, but we Brits have a nasty habit of mocking American excesses only to adopt a yet more extreme version ourselves. In 2016, for instance, North Carolina passed a prohibition on transgender people using toilets that matched their gender identity. In the British parliament there was condemnation. “A bathroom bill would never be passed in the UK,” Labour MP Ruth Cadbury confidently proclaimed in the Commons at the time. Yet less than a decade later, the government is implementing bathroom restrictions for trans people that are considerably more authoritarian than North Carolina’s. It went from impossible, to not worthy of comment virtually overnight.
And indeed, if you look carefully, the feminisation narrative is starting to creep into the UK. You can see it in the negative association both politicians in Labour and the Conservatives, and some commentators, seem to have with the “lanyard class” or the “professional managerial class”. This latter phrase is heavily gendered in the US, really referring to women in higher status or professional roles, much like how, when American conservatives use the term “cultural influence”, it is often really a reference to supposed “feminisation”.
The UK is not immune from the ideological residue of history either, from the biases that make us see power and status as naturally male. We use certain terms to positively portray right-wing policies as masculine, and left-wing ones derogatorily as feminine. As long as I’ve been alive, politicians have talked about being “tough” on crime or having “muscular” foreign policy, while decrying the “nanny state”. In both cases, the core argument appeals to implicit biases we may not even be fully aware of. This gendered language reenforces a symbolic framework in which male power is sometimes harsh, but always just, authentic, straightforward and natural. Female power, meanwhile, is caring yet grating, annoying, inauthentic, confusing, and unnatural.
And just like the US, in the UK we have adopted a gendered explanation for the rise of the populist right. Namely, that it is an (implicitly male) reaction to a female and queer-coded liberalism—a “backlash to woke” (indeed, Andrews argues that “the great feminisation” explains the great woke takeover of culture). The British press and the Labour party have bought into this explanation even more than US Democrats have, with disastrous results. The Starmer government's strategy, of governing through concessions to voters who might support Reform UK, has been a humiliating failure. Far from pacifying Labour’s opponents, validating their concerns has only emboldened the hard right.
The dissonances which the feminisation narrative exploits are as present in the UK as in the US. As society has progressed to equal opportunity laws but retained sexist biases, we have, as a Marxist might say, become involved in a contradiction. It is not simply a matter of older men holding onto traditional views. Younger men are aggressively targeted by online influencers like Andrew Tate and manosphere content preaching a new form of misogyny, which is at once otherworldly, vicious and deeply angry. This is a global trend. In the UK, as in much of the world, our gender contradiction isn’t fading away. It is becoming more pronounced, and hence more exploitable.
But it is not inevitable. The great feminisation narrative—the idea that the increased presence of women in high-status jobs will destroy our institutions and take away our freedoms—can, and should, be opposed. We can think and feel our way out of the sexist attitudes on which it draws. But to do that we have to name what we are up against. We must expose and oppose the gendered assumptions that still run through much of our society and politics. Finally, we have to abandon the assumption, dear to so many, that some innate British common sense protects us.
If we don’t, then we too may soon be debating whether women are too catty and irrational to be lawyers.
