You Can’t Understand ‘Feminization’ Discourse Without Understanding The Stunted And Censorious Nature Of Sex-Differences Research
This isn’t just about a viral conservative fad
Many institutions that used to be dominated by men are now at gender parity, or even majority-female. This is particularly true in academia. How will this change these institutions? More importantly, how will it change society?
The recent spate of discussion over “feminization” or “the great feminization” includes some actual research on this question and a lot of searingly hot takes. Let’s try to separate the wheat from the chaff.
The current surge of interest in this issue apparently started with a speech Helen Andrews gave at the National Conservatism Conference in September. She adapted it into an essay in Compact that spread far and wide — or far and wide enough, at least, that David French wrote a critical response to it for his New York Times newsletter. Andrews cited an article the social psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard wrote on this subject for Quillette in 2022. Clark has also published academic research on the question. Richard Hanania is very skeptical and ties the shoddy reasoning (as he sees it) animating feminization claims to broader problems with anti-intellectualism on the right.
I won’t leave you in suspense: While I think it’s well and good to highlight sizable sex differences in attitudes and behavior and to speculate about what they might mean as institutions become more female, I find a lot of the theorizing going on here bizarre. In many cases, proponents of the “feminization” theory (theories, really) are making the exact same sorts of leaps of logic and wildly overconfident claims they’d usually accuse “woke” researchers of making.
But I want to put this controversy into context. Because part of what makes this an interesting story is that academia, on the whole, has not done a good job taking sex differences seriously. In certain ways, the present proponents of “feminization” theory simply reflect the pendulum swinging back and wildly overshooting a reasonable center point. So all of this is easier to understand if we zoom out to better understand the broader context
Don’t You Dare Write Anything On That Slate!
In most corners of academia where those on the political left dominate — so in most corners of academia — the idea that biological factors could contribute to sex differences between men and women is seen as pseudoscientific, if not offensive.
The specifics vary from field to field. But in many areas, it’s considered a fact that biology couldn’t be responsible for these differences — rather, the differences arise solely due to external factors like cultural pressures, most notably discrimination against women.
To take just one example, regular readers of this newsletter might recall the recent news coverage over “mankeeping,” or the idea that women shoulder a disproportionate amount of the load for ensuring their male partners maintain decent social ties.
In the academic article that kicked off that discussion, the authors claimed, without citation, that “Difficulties with making or maintaining close bonds between men is not attributable to biological gender differences but instead to stringent ideological barriers that men face in the formation of nonromantic social ties,” emphasis mine. The lead author is a social psychologist and her co-author is a sociologist in training, and this view is fairly standard across many areas of academia. It’s actually a pretty radical theory, given what we know about the psychological effects of sex hormones; one could easily argue that the default assumption should be that biology does contribute to behavioral differences between men and women. And yet within certain academic bubbles, you don’t even really need to defend the blank slate view — everyone knows it’s true.
This has been a sore spot for some academics for a long time — and not just conservative ones. Steven Pinker has written about it a lot, most notably in his important 2005 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and other academics, like my friend Carole Hooven, have tried to beat the drum that men and women are different, that those differences have at least partial biological roots, and that it’s okay to say so.
The false “consensus” criticized by Pinker, Hooven, and others has been enforced not through some sort of breakthrough showing that biological differences have no psychological impact (it’s hard to imagine what some sort of breakthrough would even look like), but through moral suasion and bullying. If you argue that biology can explain male-female differences, in short, you’re either a misogynist or a misogynist-in-training. You’re saying, or at least implying, that women are inferior to males, and after thousands of years of patriarchal rule that is only just now beginning to crack, the last thing we need is for these ideas to become scientifically respectable.
Of course none of these claims flow directly from the mere observation that it’s likely biological factors help contribute to sex differences, and yet that hasn’t stopped the blank slaters from, in some cases, exacting a heavy toll on those who make certain arguments about sex differences.
The Larry Summers “scandal” is a prime example. Helen Andrews treats it as a uniquely important moment, arguing that “The entire ‘woke’ era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.”
In my view, this is silly and characteristic of the overclaiming presently going on in her camp (more on which in Part 2), but the difference between what Summers said and what he was purported to have said reveals a pretty hostile intellectual climate.
In 2005, Summers, then the president of Harvard, gave a talk at a Cambridge National Bureau of Economics Research conference on “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.” You can and should read the full text of his speech here, but much of it concerned what appeared to be a leaky pipeline (he doesn’t use that exact phrase) for female academics. As he explained, great strides had been made in making graduate programs less male-dominated, but those gains didn’t seem to be translating to the top of the field, to prestigious, tenured professorships and so on. Something was happening between when women entered academia and when they should have been emerging as its leading lights.
Summers lays out three potential theories to explain what’s going on, in rough order from most to least important. He is careful and hedge-y throughout, making clear that he is merely theorizing based on his own observations and reading. The most important factor, he said, was that the track toward top-flight academic positions requires an insane amount of commitment on the part of academics who are in their twenties, not only in terms of time actually spent on the job, but in time thinking about their job while doing other stuff. We can perhaps better understand these disparities, said Summers, by asking:
[W]hat fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don’t want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week[?] What fraction of young men make a decision that they’re unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week, and to observe what the difference is[?] And that has got to be a large part of what is observed. Now that begs entirely the normative questions — which I’ll get to a little later — of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity[]?
Summers name-checked the Harvard researchers Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz in his talk, and a lot of the work they’ve produced over the years has supported the idea that in certain fields, men get ahead because women take time off, or reduce their hours, after giving birth, usually in their twenties. I believe this to be an exceptionally important observation and one with all sorts of policy ramifications. “To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School,” said Summers, concluding this part of his talk. “She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point.”
So that was the first and most important factor Summers mentioned — one that is thoroughly uncontroversial in left-of-center circles, and that happens to fit neatly into long-standing feminist theories about the disproportionate burden of child-rearing that falls on women.
It was Summers’ proposed second-most important factor driving gender disparities in academia that would eventually lead to his resignation: the greater male-variability hypothesis.
