The West Doesn’t Need Re-Masculinising. It Needs Re-Liberalising.

Against the 'feminisation' panic.

(Audio version here)

Substack is currently alive with what has come to be called the Feminisation of Society debate. This discourse takes the position that women are coming to dominate institutions, culture, and discourse and that this is making the West weaker, more censorious, less concerned with the pursuit of truth and less rational.

Cory Clark and Bo Wingard have addressed the issue of the increasing number of women in higher education focusing on surveys revealing that “men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.” More men are in support of the study of potentially offensive topics than women and more women than men are willing to suppress such research. Their piece is factually descriptive and considers how this is changing academic culture. It is valuable.

Helen Andrews has argued that greater female participation in the public sphere has negative effects on institutions more broadly. For Andrews, “the problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” Further, she argues, once institutions reach a 50/50 split, they tend to become more and more female. (This would, of course, be self-limiting on a society-wide scale). She asks, “If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it.” This moves from a factual description to an argument and it is hyperbolic and alarmist.

Janice Fiamengo has criticised Clark, Wingard and Andrews for their unwillingness to advocate direct action to counter ‘the seeming inevitability of the west’s collapse’ and address the ‘female-led assault on our core institutions.” She proposes that we hinder women from accessing key leadership roles, allow them in lower positions only under male supervision and raise girls in the full knowledge of the “civilization-damaging realities of feminine propensities” and damp down their “female ingratitude, over-confidence, narcissism, vengefulness, and vainglory.” We are now into reactionary authoritarianism.

Critical responses have been made mostly to Andrews whose piece directly makes a case for regarding psychological sex differences on aggregate as potentially civilisation-destroying if female traits become institutionally dominant. To philosopher,

Laura Kennedy

, it is precisely on the level of argument that Andrews’ case falls down. Kennedy writes,

Andrews is not making a sociological or even a philosophical argument — she’s constructing a subjective moral hierarchy. The argument is based in emotion, generating a single bogeyman to provide a mythic and simple explanation for our overwhelming, coercive and crumbling managerial modernity, and arguing backwards from a conveniently all-encompassing conclusion. It does not consider even briefly the socioeconomic context or the very specific sort of woman Andrews’ critique might largely apply to. It merely presumes that men built ‘the West’ and women broke it, but not rational and upstanding women like Andrews, just the stupid ones who cry at the bit in films where the dog dies.

Meanwhile, right-wing political pundit and journalist,

Richard Hanania

, takes issue with it as ‘partisan hackery’ on the part of the conservative Andrews, arguing that it fails to consider all the evidence of our political reality,

So we have a theory here. More feminization → less concern for truth. Sounds plausible given the correlation between increasing female representation in journalism and academia, and the seeming decline of these industries, which I agree has happened. But there’s other evidence we can look at in order to test the theory. Half the political spectrum has completely rejected feminization, as can be seen in their support for Donald Trump, a walking repudiation of everything that the schoolmarm culture represents. Over 80% of Republican members of Congress are men, and Fox News famously treats women as eye candy. In 2024, the Trump coalition became even more male-coded, bringing in outspoken Silicon Valley billionaires and the bro podcast sphere. Did this masculinization of the movement lead to more concern with truth?

He argues convincingly that it does not, for anybody who is unaware of how the term “post-truth” came to be associated with the President of the United States.

How should those of us who care about truth, freedom of belief and speech, academic freedom and individual liberty approach these arguments? I would urge very strongly that it not be from a position of offendness which makes a claim of misogynistic motivation instead of an argument - particularly if one is female. Quite a lot of the online “feminisation of society” discourse is quite clearly misogynistic and accompanied by unambiguously contemptuous commentary about women. We should consider those contributions beneath our notice and engage with people at least giving the impression of caring about what is true and what is best for everyone in society. (It’s almost as though those two concerns both matter and are also not entirely separable).

I do not intend to make an argument against the claim that having more women in positions of power within core institutions will have an effect on the culture of those institutions. I accept that it will. Evolved psychological sex differences really do exist. I am most interested in how people of good faith can avoid being drawn into ideological narratives, and instead think about these issues in evidence-based and ethically reasoned ways. I utterly refute the idea that disallowing women from positions of public responsibility or academic leadership could somehow protect Western civilisation. On the contrary, if we were to create a state that more closely resembled the values of the Taliban than those of a liberal democracy, Western civilisation would already be lost.

At their core, these debates rest on two main worries: (1) an epistemological concern — that women care less about truth and free speech, which may harm knowledge production; and (2) an ethical or behavioural concern — that women’s characteristic social styles can foster forms of anti-social behaviour deadly to institutional health: the “toxic femininity” argument.

The Epistemological Concern

There is substantial evidence that, on average, men and women differ in how much priority they place on discovering objective facts about the world versus understanding the social environment and the feelings of others. As Clark and Wingard note, this maps well onto well supported findings that men have more interest in things and women have more interest in people, on average. There will likely never be as many women interested in construction and engineering as men nor as many men interested in social work and nursing as women. These differences become more pronounced in cultures where both sexes are able to follow their interests. At the same time, there will never be a time where everybody interested in and good at working with things is male and everybody interested in and good at working with people is female. The sexes are overlapping populations with much individual variation. As cognitive psychologist, Steven Pinker, arguing against blank slatist rejection of psychological sex differences, writes,

[W]hat we do know about the sexes does not call for any action that would penalize or constrain one sex or the other. Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women, and virtually all psychological traits may be found in varying degrees among the members of each sex. No sex difference yet discovered applies to every last man compared with every last woman, so generalizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like “proper role” and “natural place” are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.

Neither a focus on discovering truth nor on the wellbeing of people is objectively better for society. We need to both know how things work and to care about people. Nor should we assume that people who are most interested in how things work have no concern for the wellbeing of people. This would be most alarming and, if applied in a blanket way to the sexes, disqualify men from working in fields like nuclear science and virology and from taking positions of power in government. Similarly, it does not follow that those whose primary interest is the wellbeing of people care nothing about what is true. Knowing what is true is indispensable for addressing issues of wellbeing. Clark and Wingard cite Zhang et al

• Male researchers were more likely to specify scientific progress/the advancement of knowledge as the aim of their research; female researchers were more likely to specify societal progress/external usefulness as the aim of their research.

• Female scholars were more likely than their male counterparts to report that “creating a better society” inspires their work and to place higher value on research that has benefited society.

I am typically female here. My work centres on defending evidence-based epistemology and individual liberty and I have focused specifically on academic freedom. This is absolutely about creating a better society. Of course, not every woman who sees her purpose as working towards a better society will be a liberal empiricist, alas. Some will be social conservatives (like Andrews?), some will be religious believers, some libertarians, some national populists, some progressive activists and so on. Nevertheless, having people who care about the wellbeing of humans and the state of society is not an inherently bad thing.

Nevertheless, this can certainly manifest in harmful and irrational ways. The main cause of concern for many at the moment, especially within the realms of scholarship, is the social prominence of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement. This movement is one that has a decidedly low regard for the possibility or even the desirability of obtaining objective truth. Also, because of its beliefs that oppressive power dynamics are perpetuated by knowledge being constructed in the interests of the powerful and perpetuated via ways of talking about things, it is frequently explicitly in opposition to free speech. This is because it is evolved from postmodern thought and the problems created by it are something I have focused on almost exclusively for the last decade. Is this movement female-dominated? In my own experience — both in citing the scholars who theorise it and observing the activists who advance it — there are indeed more women than men involved. This is not surprising. CSJ’s central focus is on the ways in which people think and feel and relate to each other. As discussed above, more women than men are typically interested in human psychological, emotional and relational dynamics. The traditional Marxist movement, by contrast, which focuses on oppressive material systems is male dominated, as is (as Hanania noted) the right-wing ‘post-truth’ populist movement which also understands oppression as coming from the top-down via institutions.

This is all very messy because humans are messy. The solution is not to ignore these differences or to “whatabout” them by trying to even the score between the sexes, but to take them seriously and seek to understand them properly. We should be concerned that, as Clark and Wingard show, more women than men believe students should be protected from offensive ideas; support confidential reporting systems for those ideas; think promoting an inclusive society is more important than protecting free speech; and show lower support for researchers’ freedom to pursue questions without fear of institutional punishment. We should accept, provisionally, based on numerous relevant surveys that men are more protective of free speech than women are, on average.

These surveys still reveal an alarming number of men who are not committed to truth-seeking and free inquiry, however! It is not at all clear that the most efficient and effective way to address this would be by discriminating against women, even if that were ethically justifiable. This is a problem of epistemological and ethical standards falling below what we should expect from our core institutions. The solution to this is not affirmative action on behalf of men, but institutional rigour: strong epistemic norms, meritocratic standards and academic freedom. A failure to reform institutions explicitly and firmly along these lines and instead trying to shift the culture of the institutions organically via demographic manipulation is hardly a realistic long-term solution to a very real problem of declining commitment to truth and liberty.

I am not aware of a single instance where collectivism or discrimination on the basis of demographic traits has made any society better at discovering truth or protecting free inquiry. By contrast, we have strong evidence that societies organised around meritocracy, evidence, reason, and individual liberty are the ones that thrive in those pursuits. These are the defining features of Western modernity. Before the modern period, Europe was not distinguished by either intellectual rigour or freedom of belief, and this was not because women were in charge. The transformations that produced our “truth and liberty” norms were epistemological and ethical, not demographic. That remains the only effective way to defend them. If, when held to high standards of truth and liberty, fewer women than men meet those standards, so be it.

The Behavioural Concern

While the first concern about psychological sex differences and the potential impacts of more women in academia and positions of authority in core institutions is about differences in interests and priorities on aggregate, the second one is about the manifestation of extreme anti-social behaviours in women. It refers to behaviours like verbal and psychological bullying, whisper networks, character assassinations, self-victimising, social ostracism and punishing dissent indirectly via third parties rather than in direct confrontation. It refers, in short, to the elements of cancel culture.

These behaviours are often labelled “toxic femininity,” the supposed counterpart to “toxic masculinity.” But that framing is a trap, and the reasons should be obvious to anyone who objected to the pathologising of masculinity over the past decade. We saw the American Psychological Association treat male-typical traits such as competitiveness, stoicism, assertiveness and aggression as inherently harmful, especially to women. The accurate observation that some masculine traits can turn antisocial quickly mutated into a cultural narrative that masculinity itself is toxic.

In reality, traits more common in men can manifest positively, negatively, or neutrally. Competitiveness drives innovation but can degenerate into destructive rivalry. Stoicism enables resilience yet can harden into emotional unavailability. Assertiveness aids clarity and progress; aggression, channelled well, defends and protects, but at its worst becomes unjustifiable violence. The vast majority of men are neither heroes nor villains but individuals somewhat more direct than women on average. Demonising masculinity has harmed young men in particular; when society labels normal male traits as pathological, it alienates those it means to help. The right approach is to target toxicity, not masculinity. We punish assault, not assertiveness; sack bullies, not achievers; worry about those who won’t seek help, not those who stoically cope and carry on.

Anyone who recognised the problems with pathologising masculinity and rightly criticised the black-and-white thinking and collective blame should be able to see the same flaws in the “feminisation will destroy civilisation” narrative. Yet many don’t. Instead, we hear that empathy, conflict-aversion, and social concern are themselves toxic. Only their most, extreme negative expressions are noticed, and we are asked to picture workplaces overrun by manipulative, self-victimising backbiters policing one another for “problematic” behaviour. Absent from this caricature is the reality that these same traits, expressed well, produce cooperation, communication, ethical awareness, and effective client care. Most often, they simply make women a little more attuned to colleagues’ moods and needs. On average.

Nor is it likely that pathologising femininity will reduce female anti-social behaviour. Did calling men violent, boorish, and repressed make them kinder? I think not. It bred alienation, worsened male mental health, increased the popularity of figures ranging from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate, and fueled the growth of the ‘incel’ and other misogynistic subcultures. If we were to follow Fiamengo’s advice and tell women they are defined by “ingratitude, over-confidence, narcissism, vengefulness, and vainglory,” we’d see the same result: a surge in female alienation, a decline in women’s mental health and wellbeing and the growth of a bitter, militant form of feminism.

If we accept that institutions survived centuries of male rivalry without everyone being punched in the face, we should consider it likely that they can survive a greater representation of women without everyone being cancelled. This is not to deny the problem of authoritarian Critical Social Justice in the workplace! I have just spent the last five years helping people of both sexes deal with it. Nobody has yet suggested that the problem has been caused by an increase of women in their workplace and all seem very clear that it was caused by the adoption of ideologically-biased policies. More women may participate in this culture, but the deeper failure lies with employers and administrators who adopt ideologically loaded policies. They do so largely due to external cultural pressure and because this is cheaper PR than actually doing anything to improve workplace environments and increase access to professions for members of minority groups. This issue was addressed rather well by the otherwise dubious Vivek Ramaswamy in Woke Inc. This is not a “female” problem, but an institutional one.

The belief that we can fix ideological capture by banning fashionable ideas or the people statistically somewhat more likely to hold them shows a lack of long-term thinking. The cure is institutional reform, not demographic engineering. Admittedly, writing policies against “toxic masculinity” is easier than addressing the subtler harms of “toxic femininity”: punching leaves evidence; weaponising empathy does not. But both are forms of anti-social behaviour and both can only be addressed effectively by policy reform that addresses the behaviours themselves.

I have been helping companies to do this for some time. The key is to define acceptable conduct in terms of principles and behaviours: honesty, transparency, proportionality, respect for evidence, commitment to viewpoint diversity, and freedom of belief. Prohibit attempts to impose any religious, political, or ideological worldview on colleagues. Make emotional reasoning, moral bullying, and spurious third-party complaints as unacceptable as domineering behaviour, sexual harassment, or physical aggression, whoever commits them. If such policies end up disciplining more women than men, so be it.

It is both possible and necessary to acknowledge psychological sex differences and the impact of these on the culture of institutions without demonising or pathologising either sex, creating moral hierarchies or engaging in illiberal identity-based hiring practices. Equal treatment under the law, individual responsibility, meritocracy and a commitment to evidence and reason regardless of group demographic are foundational liberal principles that made truth-seeking and freedom possible in the first place.

Both illiberal fringes now threaten those foundations. The illiberal identitarian approach to social justice of the contemporary left, which sees masculinity as a pathology and speech as harm, corrodes freedom and harms men. The illiberal identitarian backlash from the right that casts femininity as civilisation-destroying, and women as unfit for public life, corrodes reason and harms women. Both demand conformity to essentialised stereotypes that do not map onto reality; both replace evidence with emotion; both damage relationships between men and women; both weaken institutions; both erode the liberal norms that enable us to produce knowledge and resolve differences.

Liberalism’s answer must be the same to both: no collective blame, no moral hierarchies of sex, race, or belief. The goal is not to re-masculinise society or re-feminise it, but to re-liberalise it and restore the principles that hold messy, pluralistic human beings to common standards of reason, fairness, and freedom.

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