The problem isn't 'feminization,' it's status

Too many elites and crumbling institutions make status scarce and competition fierce

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In recent weeks, the so-called Great Feminization has polarized the intelligentsia. Writer Helen Andrews floated the idea, which is that as women make up larger and larger shares of some (elite) professions, they change those professions’ cultures and values. She blames this process for the rise of wokeness and illiberalism, and is especially concerned about the fate of the legal profession.

A core part of Andrews’ argument is that institutions — things like academia — are broken, and that “feminization” is what broke them. I’m skeptical, but do agree (and I think most people agree) that many institutions seem paralyzed.

And so here is my thesis today: The rise of women in the workplace correlates to the breakdown of institutions, but is not necessarily the cause. Moreover, something else that also coincided with this breakdown is what some experts describe as an “overproduction of elites.” This overproduction means that there are more people who want status than there is status to go around. There’s status scarcity — which I think is a better explanation for problems like cancel culture and illiberalism than Andrews’ argument. Scarcity creates an incentive for people to act badly, fight dirty, and degrade institutions as they fight for a shrinking number of top positions.

The solution, then, is not some sort of policy fix that would stop tilting the scales in favor of women — which is what Andrews seems to want. The solution is to address the scarcity of status and change the incentives. It’s like designing a street; you can put up or take down all the speed limit signs you want. But if you really want people to drive safely, you have to build a better street.

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In case you haven’t read Andrews’ full piece, her idea of “feminization” doesn’t refer to “girly” things. This isn’t a Legally Blonde world. Instead, Andrews is talking about a specific worldview that deprioritizes things like due process and fact-based evidence. It’s a worldview that uses rules and bureaucracy to make decisions about staffing and values. It’s a world where identity matters more than merit. I think the ongoing collapse of the Sierra Club that the New York Times just documented captures the problem as Andrews sees it (though she doesn’t mention that specific example). And ultimately, Andrews argues that “female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” And she says that when women take over, say, an academic department, that department’s objectives end up “oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.”

I’ll be honest, I actually found many of Andrews’ specific claims quite unpersuasive. The quotes above — as well as others such as “men tend to be better at compartmentalizing than women” — seem to rely on a kind of “trust me, bro” logic. Are men better at compartmentalizing? Hmm. Prove it.

Leah Libresco Sargeant similarly pushed back during a New York Times podcast, arguing among other things that some of the attributes Andrews assigns to women aren’t exclusively feminine. She also framed recent cultural changes such as “wokeness” as the latest in a long tradition of religious revivals in America. And she argued elsewhere that Andrews’ thesis would benefit from more “concrete, data-driven analysis” — which I agree with.

Jesse Singal also critiqued Andrews, and included in his critique a discussion of research on differences in institutions that are run by men versus women.

But what really struck me while reading Andrews’ piece is that it felt like Nietzsche’s concept of master-slave morality. Nietzsche associated “masters” with power and nobility. They win whatever they’re doing based on strength or merit. Meanwhile, in Nietzsche’s framework “slaves morality” involves using deviousness, resentment, and trickery. He also associated his idea of slave morality with Christianity.

Andrews is not exactly making Nietzsche’s argument because she’s trying to defend Judeo-Christian liberalism, which was not Nietzsche’s thing. But both are saying that a weaker, inferior worldview is taking over not because it’s winning on the merits but because it’s tweaking the rules. Both are basically upset that losers (in their view) are now in charge. It’s a question of power.

The regrettable rise of alleged loser-dom is actually something much of the literati is worried about right now. Just a few days ago, for instance, New York Times columnist David French criticized “groypers” — basically far-right internet trolls — while debating conservative writer Rod Dreher, who himself lamented “15, 20 years of illiberal wokeness in power.” Meanwhile, Derek Thompson recently critiqued the rise of “monks in the casino,” or young men who are hooked on internet vices but isolated in real life.

All of these folks are coming at the topic from different angles, but the underlying thread is a sense that bad-faith actors are gaining influence. We live not in an age of warrior-poets but of porn-addled young men and plagiarizing college professors. And in that light, what Andrews has done — what made her piece go viral — is come up with the most provocative label for those apparent bad actors.

But I actually find Peter Turchin’s take on this problem more compelling.

Turchin is a professor at the University of Connecticut who in recent years has become famous for his ideas about the “overproduction of elites.” The gist is that as more and more people go to college, more and more people aspire to elite roles in society. Unfortunately, though, there aren’t enough slots for all of those people. An example of this would be how there are more people getting PhDs than there are tenure-track jobs for PhD holders. So, demand for elite positions outstrips supply.

This supply-demand imbalance then pushes people to the extremes. Think of six people vying for a single political office; the person who is the loudest and most extreme will get the most attention. The candidates race to the fringes, which we’ve already seen happening.

In politics, the focus might shift from governing to beating your opponents. In academia or media, we might expect to see the rise of cancel culture. As more people vie for fewer spots, there’s more incentive to knock out your opponents and beef up your resume via whatever means necessary. That’s not to say people who were canceled didn’t deserve it, but rather just that scarcity intensifies competition.

So, are women inherently worse at working in institutions? Or could it just be that the number of people with elite aspirations has grown dramatically, and now they’re fighting harder — and dirtier — because the stakes are higher. We know scarcity has an impact on competition, whether that competition is between two lions on the savannah or between two dads on Black Friday. So it makes sense that as the supply of high-status positions falls behind demand, people would abandon high-minded liberalism and rationality in favor of just winning. And in that light, the gender of the people responding to status scarcity seems almost incidental¹.

In other words, this doesn’t seem like a feminization problem. It seems like a supply and demand problem².

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There is one more piece of this puzzle, though, that I don’t think gets enough attention, and it’s that we’re not just producing too many elites. We’re also reducing the number of status-conferring slots. Supply is going down as demand goes up. It’s like having an egg shortage on Easter.

Part of the problem is the well-documented erosion of institutions such as churches and civic organizations — which I’ve previously written about here and here.

But changes in the job market are making things even worse. In the Times podcast, for example, Andrews and Sargeant talk about how veterinary medicine has become dominated by women and also undergone “corporatization” — meaning veterinarians mostly used to own their own businesses but today tend to work for larger companies.

Everyone on the podcast agrees that corporatization is fine, but I’m not so sure. After all, who has more status, an owner-operator or a W2 employee? Who is more likely to serve as, say, the president of the local chamber of commerce?

Or take my field, news media. Fifty years ago, it meant something to be the ace reporter at a midsized newspaper, or to be the editor who hired that reporter. Today, those specific jobs mostly don’t exist because so many papers are gone. And the jobs that remain are lower status.

The point is that the evolution of the job market is actually contributing to the status scarcity. There are fewer paths for ambitious strivers, and so the competition is more intense. And indeed media is a Turchin-ian case study in what happens next. Media was ground zero for cancel culture, large swaths of the profession are abandoning values such as impartiality, and institutions themselves are losing the trust of their readers. Turchin was right. The fact that there are more working women today seems relevant mostly just in the sense that the size of the workforce has increased.

Let me now summarize my argument here to make one final point:

1. Institutions are not working the way we want. I think most people agree on that.

2. The workforce has changed a lot in recent decades. One of those changes is that there is an overproduction of elites, and an underproduction of elite jobs.

3. This creates a supply and demand imbalance. Demand for status is high, but supply is low. And where there is scarcity, competition intensifies.

   1. (Status scarcity seems like a better explanation for things like cancel culture and illiberalism to me than the idea that women just can’t compartmentalize or whatever.)

4. If supply and demand are imbalanced, you can either reduce demand or you can increase supply.

And this brings me to my final point: The solution involves increasing the supply of high-status positions. In other words, more institutions. More avenues to the top. More metaphorical places we can refer to as the top. So, more chambers of commerce. More churches. More Rotary Clubs. More owner-operator businesses³. More big dynastic families. I’ll tease this out in a future post. But for now suffice to say that I don’t think the problem is feminization. I think the problem is that people are fighting over a shrinking pool of power. The solution then is to make the pool bigger.

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1. Notably, Turchin has pointed to past periods of instability that share some similarities with our own. I don’t recall him making this point exactly, but it’s worth noting that during these periods men still dominated workplaces, especially elite ones.

2. In some ways, Andrews’ argument itself is an example of what Turchin is talking about. Andrews is taking a provocative stance and getting a lot of attention for it. She’s winning the status game. I don’t mean this as a criticism. I like Andrews’ writing even when I disagree with it. But it’s an illustrative example of how there are incentives to take the most extreme positions.

3. This is a footnote specifically for my sisters, with whom I recently got into a debate about the value of hole-in-the-wall restaurants. And I would just like to point out that the idea isn’t just that the food is better, though it can be, but also that eating local is a political choice tied up in your attitude about local versus “foreign” (meaning anything outside your immediate community) power.