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Ross Douthat: Men and women are different. That is a core premise of conservatism in the age of Trump, that liberalism and feminism have come to grief by pretending that the sexes are the same.
But what does that difference really mean? Should the right be trying to roll back the entire feminist era? Or is there a form of conservative feminism that corrects liberalism’s mistakes?
My guests this week, Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant, are both conservative writers, both critics of feminism, but they have very different views of what a right-wing politics of gender should look like.
So, Helen, Leah, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant: [Simultaneously] Thank you.
Douthat: [Chuckles.] You’re welcome. I should note, this is the first time this show has had more than one guest, so it’s a radical experiment for me as a host. I make no promises about how I will handle the disagreements or agreements to come.
But you’re both here, I’m sorry to say, as theorists. We’re going to try to debate your theories.
Helen, you recently wrote an essay entitled “The Great Feminization” that attracted some commentary on the internet and argued, at least in my gloss, that feminism has failed us because it’s made our institutions too feminized, driving men and masculine virtues out.
And Leah, you have a new book called “The Dignity of Dependence,” where you suggest that liberal feminism has failed us by forcing women to suppress their nature and fit into workplaces and social systems made for men.
So those are two fairly distinct critiques of feminism as it exists right now. But before we dig into those arguments, I want to start by asking a really simple, basic and easy question.
I’ll start with you, Helen: What is the difference between men and women?
Andrews: I feel like I’m a Supreme Court justice nominee. Well, thank you ——
Douthat: Well, no, because the Supreme Court justice nominee is allowed to not answer, but I’m afraid ——
Andrews: I don’t have that privilege.
Douthat: That you don’t have that privilege here.
Andrews: I think that question starts us off backward. Because in the piece that I wrote about the great feminization, I did not start from my opinions about what the differences are between men and women and then proceed to speculate on how that might affect our institutions. I started by observing our institutions in all the ways that they seem very clearly self-evidently broken and not working the way that they’re supposed to, in ways that you could sum up in the word “wokeness.”
I think that there are some generalizations that can be made about tendencies that are male or female — masculine virtues and vices, and feminine virtues and vices — but those things are always a spectrum, and it’s hard to get a grip on them. And if I sat here and said, Women tend to be more emotional, while men tend to be more intellectual, you could have five perfectly valid objections to that right off the bat.
So I think I will restrict myself to the judgment on which I am confident, which is that the pathology in our institutions known as wokeness is distinctively feminine and feminized. And that, in a very literal sense, our institutions have gone woke because there are more women in them than there used to be.
Douthat: What is the essential nature of wokeness that you associate with a certain kind of feminized politics or feminized ways of relating to other people, relating to colleagues or co-workers, or anything else?
Andrews: Let’s pick one flavor of wokeness, and that is the #MeToo movement. It was not just an increase in the volume of sex scandals. There have been sex scandals since the dawn of politics, and it was not just that there were more of them than there used to be. If it were simply a matter of more women having the self-confidence to speak up and challenge their accusers, I don’t think anyone could possibly object to that. But that’s not what the #MeToo movement was.
The #MeToo movement was a change in the rules of how sex scandals work. There was a change in what kinds of behavior were held up for censure, and you had people like comedian Aziz Ansari being canceled for what was, at the end of the day, just a bad date. And he was guilty of not much more than severe awkwardness.
It suddenly became mandatory for us to believe all women, no matter how credible or not credible their testimony might be. It got to the point where to even probe a woman’s story with various questions about the facts of the case became an affront and was disrespectful to women.
So that to me is the essence of wokeness that you see in all of its other variations on campuses or in the workplace: shutting down conversations, intruding politics into spheres that had previously been neutral — importantly neutral. Pillars of civilization — neutrality, things like the rule of law — were suddenly subject to politicization in a way that was really, really harmful.
So, I don’t know — I don’t want to say that we all know what wokeness is, but those at least were its important characteristics from my perspective, the things about it that worried me the most.
Douthat: OK. I have more questions, but I want to start Leah with a fairly direct question, because you are identifying yourself in your book as a particular kind of feminist. And I want to ask you: What is wrong with existing feminism — liberal feminism — and how has it failed women?
Libresco Sargeant: So, I think the essential problem is that there’s a strain of feminism that sees any difference between men and women as a threat to our equality.
You can see this in a variety of ways, something pretty small-scale: There’s a lot of going back and forth on the college level about where the three-point line should be for men’s and women’s basketball. Should it be equivalently hard for a man and woman to hit the shot? Or should it be at exactly the same spot, so that no one can say that women aren’t playing as hard?
I don’t actually care that much about basketball, I’ll level with you. But I think that anxiety — that to draw two lines on the court would, in some way, imperil women’s dignity — is wrongheaded.
And you see it have a real cost in other domains, where that attempt to treat women like defective men who are nearly identical, nearly swappable, and when we can close that gap, no one will be able to tell us we’re less than — it ultimately does a fundamental injustice to women, and it results in violence toward babies, because, of course, pregnancy is the most obvious way women differ from men. It won’t ever be fully closed.
Douthat: And a big part of your argument is that the institutions of American life or Western life, since the feminist revolution, have basically said to women: Yes you can join up. You can have the jobs you want. You can have the equality you want. But we will not accommodate ourselves, too. What you just defined as the greatest female distinctive, right? So you have to, in effect, become as men in order to enter the professional classes.
Libresco Sargeant: And when you aren’t, it’s kind of a personal hobby. You hear that language of personal choice, not only on the left with regard to abortion, but for conservatives in opposition to things like SNAP benefits for unmarried women: Well, you chose to have this baby while you were poor, and everyone knows you could have chosen differently — when that could entail not having sex or killing the baby in the womb after sex has been had.
So there is this sense that the base-line person does not have someone to depend on in this way. I think pregnancy is the starkest example, and it’s the gendered example, but the sense that the fundamental nature of the human person is someone who isn’t constrained by someone else’s need isn’t just a problem for women — it’s a problem for all of us. Each of us has people who depend on us, even if we go through our whole lives childless, because we have parents who increasingly are aging without the supports to age all alone.
Douthat: How do you distinguish between dependence and weakness? Even though everyone is dependent in some way, part of your argument is that, by necessity, women are the more dependent sex in some ways. What distinguishes that from saying women are just the weaker sex?
Libresco Sargeant: So here’s where I will push back on the definition. Women are more directly exposed to other people’s needs, but historically, men also view their bodies as something they extend over someone else who needs them — not over a baby through pregnancy, but by placing themselves between an outside threat and their family or their country.
We live in an unusually safe and prosperous time, so it’s much less likely that you will think: I will take a wound to my body for the sake of my family — than that your wife will.
Douthat: So then it is fundamentally issues about biology, family, and reproduction, where you would say that liberal feminism essentially asks women to postpone or delay things that are natural to women.
But, Helen, working off Leah’s argument, you have a conception essentially that there is a kind of evolutionary story in which men evolved to be warriors — putting their bodies in front of their families or their communities, taking wounds, and so on — and that women evolve to be worriers. Can you talk a little bit about that distinction and where those phrases come from?
Andrews: Sure. That phrase comes from a psychologist called Joyce Benenson who did a book called “Warriors and Worriers,” and that is a book that I found very enlightening because it was not about the differences between individual men and individual women. That’s something that has been subject to a lot of study, that you give men and women polls and they will give different answers to your surveys. Her subject was group dynamics — how do groups of men interact, versus how do groups of women interact? — and that seemed to me to correspond very closely to the changes that we would describe as wokeness.
Her theory is that this originated in the mists of prehistory, that men were organized to have warrior bands, which meant they needed to have hierarchical structures. They needed to know how to take orders and give orders and not take it personally when their leader made a choice that they didn’t agree with. And they needed to be able to engage in conflict, to fight, and then, when that fight was over, you needed to be able to make peace. And that women, being more oriented toward child rearing, were more likely to have protracted conflict with their rivals within the tribe and were less likely to reconcile at the end. There are similar insights that can be gleaned from primatology.
Now, when you’re talking about gender differences, I think you need to hold different kinds of expertise as having varying levels of credibility. But I think that the insights of evolutionary biology or primatology are at least interesting fodder. If somebody gave me that book and said: Now speculate on what the results of the feminization of institutions will be — I don’t know that I would’ve guessed that they would be as dramatic as they have been.
But when I look at wokeness and say that it has coincided almost exactly in time with the demographic tip-over of various institutions from being majority male to majority female, and if the changes of wokeness resemble feminine behavior as described by evolutionary biology, then maybe that starts to make a lot of sense.
Douthat: So, Leah, are women the problem with wokeness?
Libresco Sargeant: No, I don’t think so. I think America is a country of repeated religious revival, and this was one of them. It swept up both men and women and came out of a fundamental sense of: What’s wrong with us? — the fundamental question people are always asking: What’s wrong with us, and what can we do about it?
I think wokeness was deeply interested in questions about guilt but had thin answers for how guilt can be expiated and where it’s located. But I see this as less of a significant deviation from other parts of American history.
Douthat: Let me ask you, though, about wokeness in particular. In the course of your own argument, you write: “A society that cannot imagine placing the weak at its center, that forgets that society exists for the weak, will be drawn toward the Manichaean modes of cancel culture.” So you’re looking at the same phenomenon that Helen is looking at, and you’re saying: Well, there’s not enough respect for dependence and weakness.
Don’t you think that wokeness, whether it is a feminized phenomenon or not, is certainly, in its own self-conception, a mode of trying to get people to care about the weak?
Libresco Sargeant: I think this is where we couple, first, an orientation toward the weak, a preferential option toward the poor, with truth-seeking. They do go together. The weakness of a baby is pretty incontrovertible. The moral status of a baby is where people start to have a philosophical fight.
I see a lot of the frenzy of wokeness around people in the sense of: Could it be true that in a meaningful sense, I’m complicit in systems of evil?
This zeal for moral concern — that’s good. The sense of: How do I put things right in a situation where I’m constantly entangled with at least partial cooperation with evil? — that’s a good question.
How do you put it right is not primarily through self-flagellation. It’s through actively doing good.
Douthat: What about the aspect of wokeness that says: Look, we are going to give special attention to people who are disadvantaged, who represent a tradition of suffering or disadvantage, who come from disadvantaged minorities — or the disadvantaged sex or gender, as the case may be — and essentially give them a special leg up, special deference in debate?
And that’s the place where Helen immediately says: You’ve lost truth-seeking, and maybe you’ve become too feminized. But what——
Libresco Sargeant: I wouldn’t say deference in debate. I would say attentiveness to what kind of policies are appropriate.
And here’s where I draw a big distinction between two attempts to do a special justice to the most disadvantaged students, one of which went very badly, and one of which is going very well. The idea of: We don’t have enough students of color in our algebra classes in middle school. We’ve got this disparate impact. Let’s get rid of the algebra class in California — that’s not ultimately rooted in the sense of: OK, well, what are we doing, and is it working?
Versus the Mississippi Miracle — the schools that overhauled how they taught phonics, and how they got everyone on board, and they said: We can tell it’s working when the test scores improve, not when we hold a congratulatory press conference where we say we’re getting rid of the way we were measuring a difference. But when we provide material support, knowing it may not work, check — roll back.
And what I think is often missing, and part of the reasons the excesses you’re describing turn up a lot in the nonprofit and academic sector, is the sense of: Do you work in a domain where there are tight feedback loops about whether you’re failing?
It’s normal to fail when you do things. And I think that’s what’s missing in a lot of domains of life, that if I were going to do one thing, to say: How could I make the work force feel more like the way Helen wants it to? — it’d be less about adjusting the gender difference, and more about people having more experiences starting in school where they do things they can fail at.
Andrews: I don’t have any problem with that. I think learning through failure is great. There’s a lot of truth in that.
Douthat: But one of the dynamics here, and one of the obvious reactions to your essay, is that there are still plenty of men in positions of power all over the United States, but I think part of your argument is that men in those environments are effectively constrained by an expectation — I think this might have been your language — that women are not allowed to fail.
Andrews: Right. So, to start off with the empirical question of whether or not feminization is true, whether it is a fact about the world, that we are living in a more feminized society — I understand people who say that men still outnumber women among C.E.O.s and therefore that proves that we don’t live in a feminized society. But I think that’s just a failure to understand how linear time works.
The fact that tenured professors are still predominantly male because these people got their Ph.D.s back in the 1980s, doesn’t really tell you a whole lot if you’re in a field where 75 percent of Ph.D.s today currently go to women, as is the case in the profession of psychology.
So it’s correct that we have not yet had a female president. On the other hand, it’s also true that the White House staff was 60 percent female under President Biden. So does the one prove definitively that we don’t live in a feminine society, or does the other prove that we do? I don’t know. I think these are all relevant facts.
Libresco Sargeant: I think you’re right. It’s always the junior levels that are a lot more female-tilted, and they’re moving gradually up, so you can expect that trend to continue. But then there’s the question of a generation of boomers who have a real distrust of themselves as authority figures with something valuable to hand on. Then you can see this sense of: Well, let’s be led by our junior staff.
And I don’t see that primarily as: Well, the men forgot what it was to be men. I think the men forgot what they were doing, or thought of themselves as having something valuable to pass on. Men and women both in the boomer generation — where does that kind of vacuum of authority and culture fit into the story you’re telling?
Andrews: I would never want to pass up an opportunity to boomer bash, but I’m not sure that that’s the story that’s going on here. Certainly there were many institutions and companies during the height of wokeness that felt like they were held hostage by their younger workers. Their younger workers were demanding wokeness, and the managers were too terrified to do anything but capitulate.
But I think that ——
Lebresco Sargeant: Terrified of what exactly?
Andrews: What an apt question. When you look at somebody like James Damore, the Google guy who got fired for issuing a memo saying that male overrepresentation in hard sciences might be attributable to biological differences and differences in interest, he was not fired because Googlers were calling for his head and the management was afraid of a staff revolt. He was fired because any woman alleging gender discrimination — any woman in his division — could then sue the company and say: I have not been given opportunities because the atmosphere at Google believes that women are less capable than men. It was because of legal liability.
So that’s where I think a lot of the indignation at the article I wrote puzzles me, but I think it’s just because it comes from people who are not aware of the way the law is currently lopsided in favor of punishing male vices and allowing feminized vices totally free rein.
Douthat: Just for clarity’s sake, what are female and male vices?
Andrews: So there was a landmark gender discrimination case in the 1990s that involved a woman who worked at a shipyard. The work force there was overwhelmingly male, and she claimed in her lawsuit that she was not given the same opportunities as the men, that she was made to feel unwelcome. And one of the items of evidence in this lawsuit that she offered was that some of the male mechanics had pinups on the walls of their work areas, and that these half-clad women made her feel uncomfortable.
She was successful. The court said: Yes, that is a discriminatory aspect of the workplace. The boss needs to tell him to take those down.
But that is not the only kind of masculine conduct that has fallen afoul of these kinds of lawsuits.
Libresco Sargeant: Can we sit with that example for just a second? I’ve read the case.
Andrews: Sure, I would be happy to. Please.
Libresco Sargeant: What you’re glossing as a pinup was multiple photos of completely naked women in close-up. The woman had sexist graffiti, and one of her male co-workers thrust his leg in between her legs.
Is there a little bit of rowdiness to men? Yes. But I think it’s actually unfair to men to sweep that kind of pervasive nudity and specific sexist language and physical grabbing as just part of broad male vices that we need more space for in the work force. And I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as “she didn’t like the pinups.”
Andrews: This is why I am establishing a spectrum of masculine behavior, and I am using that case as my anchor out at one end as the kind of behavior we can all agree, sure, OK, yes, by all means, that should be grounds for a lawsuit.
Well, let me pose to you another case that I think you will find a lot more ambiguous. There have been several gender discrimination lawsuits against Wall Street firms in the last 20 years — female traders and analysts who say that the men at Morgan Stanley make more money than they do, that the most aggressive traders are given the best clients, and that those tend to be men, and that that is discrimination against women.
Now, some of the women in these Wall Street cases can point to incidents that we would describe as sexual harassment, that some co-worker grabbed them and kissed them after a drunken work party.
OK, that’s fine. But some of these women cited, as their examples of testosterone-fueled behavior in the workplace, push-up contests. She said: The other traders on my team had push-up contests, and this was discriminatory against me because that was a form of team building that I was not able to participate in.
The real problem with these laws is that most masculine behavior falls into the gray area of “not clearly illegal” but could be cited by somebody if they filed a gender discrimination lawsuit. So I think managers take that information, and they think: I can get in trouble for having a toxically masculine workplace, but I’m not really ever going to get in trouble for having a toxically feminine workplace. So if there is ever, in the balance, I’m always going to err on this side — that’s probably bad.
Douthat: So for both of you, what is toxic femininity? If there are distinctive masculine vices — I think we can concede that there are. There’s a lot of talk about toxic masculinity. It’s a regular subject of discussion. What are the feminine vices in that story?
Andrews: Gossiping. Inability to deal with conflict directly and kind of suppressing conflict. An aversion to directness, which, naturally, in a workplace, is a big problem because you need to be able to give direct feedback to people, including negative feedback.
Douthat: How would you imagine a landscape where the fairness you have in mind that you think is absent in how men and women are treated — are you going to have a man sue for a hostile work environment, complaining that his female co-workers gossip too much, or didn’t argue with him enough?
Andrews: Or that I was reprimanded for giving what I thought was really straightforward, clear feedback to somebody, that she then reported me to H.R. and said I was being abusive? That happens all the time. All the time.
And to be clear, I’m advocating for fewer lawsuits, not more. I think probably the best equilibrium is that not every workplace is going to be a good fit for everybody, so why don’t we have some workplaces that are more masculine-inflected, and some that are more feminine, and we’ll just not sue each other over it at all? How about that for a deal?
Libresco Sargeant: I think some of what you’re describing is not exclusively feminine, and it’s strange to characterize it so strongly in that direction. It’s a product of human beings being bad at group dynamics in a variety of ways, that men can fail at and women can fail at.
And it happens in male-dominated places, too, where they’re explicitly doing truth-seeking, because it’s very hard as a discipline to value the truth more than your own pride.
We say sometimes that pride can be, I think, a masculine vice as well as a feminine vice, and both men and women have trouble loving the truth more than they love the image of themselves as someone who already knew it.
Douthat: Is that the primary thing that you think is lost in institutions that undergo what you’re calling feminization, the failure to seek truth? In terms of the actual effects on society writ large — not just people in the break room or people dealing with H.R., but all of society — you are saying that institutions that have this kind of conflict aversion are less likely to just get to the truth?
Andrews: I think that’s right, and I think that’s why the harms or perils of feminization have to be examined on a case-by-case basis for each institution and discipline. I think something like 80 percent of veterinary students are women today.
Libresco Sargeant: Are they doing a bad job at treating the pets?
Douthat: Yeah, are you worried?
Libresco Sargeant: Do you predict they are?
Andrews: As far as I know, this has not had catastrophic effects.
Libresco Sargeant: Why?
Andrews: Well, actually, Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, notes in her book that male veterinarians are more likely to own their own practices, whereas female veterinarians prefer not to because being an owner involves more financial risk and longer and less flexible hours.
So the shift from a male-dominated profession to a female-dominated profession in the area of veterinary medicine has led to corporatization, and we’ve gone from a world where most veterinarians own their own practices to one where most veterinary practices are owned by private equity, which has not been entirely without problems for the pets and farm animals of America.
But I am willing to state that, corporatization aside, the feminization of veterinary medicine has not led to the collapse of society, and is unlikely to do so. I think it’s basically fine, but ——
Libresco Sargeant: What’s the protective element there? Or what can be learned from veterinary medicine to take into white-collar work?
It just seems odd that you’re describing this general dynamic that women, you say, would undermine completely the rule of law, that we’ll lose the rule of law in our lifetimes when women become a majority of lawyers. If it’s that stark in law, I’d expect — if your claim is true — some erosion in veterinary medicine, or pharmacy, which is also dominated by women, and where you can track the failures because people die.
Andrews: I would not expect to see a catastrophic effect from feminization in veterinary medicine. I don’t know, like, why is that hard to see?
Douthat: But is that because ——
Andrews: Well, no. Let me maybe reframe it in a way that will make a point that seems very obvious to me, clear to the people at this table.
If there are more female historians than male historians, that will have some effects on what gets studied in history. You will have more social history and feminist history, and a lot less military history and economic history.
Now, I’m willing to say that that’s sort of fine, and that maybe the old male-dominated history profession did not do enough social history. And we can all probably agree that the correct balance for the history profession is a little bit of each. That’s kind of a neutral result of feminization.
On the other hand, the fact that certain areas of inquiry are ruled out of bounds in history or in psychology now because they are too controversial, that — which is what wokeness is — seems like a genuine problem. That’s not just that feminization has caused some changes, and some of them are good and some of them are bad, and we all need to learn how to live with the world being different now — that’s a bad thing, because it involves history or psychology not doing what it is supposed to do, which is pursue the truth.
Douthat: Don’t you think, though, that there have been a lot of moments and eras in history when institutions have failed catastrophically at the task of truth-seeking?
And just in terms of the overall societal consequences, the stakes of this argument — again, we’re not just talking about workplace dynamics. We’re talking about academia failing to solve serious problems and journalists failing to report the whole truth about the world — this is your critique of feminization. I think it is a reasonable critique of things that wokeness did. But you can find plenty of historical case studies where regimes, systems, forms of government did all the kinds of things that you’re bemoaning under entirely male-dominated conditions.
Andrews: I am baffled by people who think that a litany of male failures is some kind of rebuttal — not to say that you’re making a bad point. I think you’re making a very sensible point ——
Douthat: You can tell me I’m making a bad point. It’s not a litany of male failures; it’s the kind of male failures. If the stakes here are, feminized institutions don’t adequately seek truth, but it seems to be that there are many situations where institutions fail to seek truth under male domination, why are we assuming that it is the female element in particular?
Andrews: One counterexample of male failure and male failure to seek truth that gets thrown back at me a lot is the Red Scare. And how can you say that women are the only people who ever do witch hunts? Think about McCarthyism.
And without wanting to get too deep into the “Joe McCarthy did nothing wrong” rabbit hole ——
Douthat: No, no, that ——
Andrews: That is not the point that I’m making today. Let me make instead a different point, which is that I think that McCarthyism was actually, in many ways, quite masculine.
Think about loyalty oaths. The whole reason why university systems and schools and other institutions wanted to have loyalty oaths, which are sort of the banner phenomenon of McCarthyism, is because they said: We simply cannot have an ongoing atmosphere of suspicion and rumor and sort of witch hunting. We need to have some clarity. So we will have a loyalty oath, and everybody who takes it will be fine. And everybody who doesn’t take it, well, that’ll be a problem.
Douthat: [Chuckles.] They won’t be fine.
Andrews: They won’t be fine.
Douthat: They won’t participate in the argument.
Andrews: But at least it then will be done. Then it will be finished, and it will be all out in the open. And the criteria for deciding whether or not somebody is a communist will be known, and we will evaluate them in kind of a straightforward, objective way.
So that was in some ways a male witch hunt.
Douthat: Right.
Andrews: But it operated by masculine rules.
Libresco Sargeant: Are diversity statements the same kind of thing? That it’s a loyalty oath about the aims of the institution? It’s a masculine attempt to put an end to feminine gossiping in the universities?
Andrews: Yeah. I think the thing that offends a lot of people about diversity statements, especially for new applicants to jobs, is that it’s not a clear ticking the box: Are you going to treat people fairly or not?
It’s: Show me how much you care about diversity. Prove to me that you are really on board with this focus.
And that’s just kind of ——
Libresco Sargeant: So, by your defense of the communist loyalty oaths, if it were less of a discursive essay and more of signing a statement of principles, which some people could sign and you possibly could not — that would feel like more of a masculine policing of the bounds in which a rough and tumble of academia seeking truth within certain definitions could flourish. Is that right?
Andrews: I think the existence of a woke university that wanted all of its faculty and prospective faculty to sign on to some kind of clear statement of principles — yeah, OK. And maybe it would be one that would be super D.E.I., and I couldn’t sign it, but I would be OK with that.
What I would not be OK with is people intruding D.E.I. statements into, for example, the accreditation of law schools. And to be a valid law school in the United States, you have to teach everyone D.E.I. as part of their legal ethics training. I think accreditation is about: Are you a valid law school or a valid university? — so let’s leave politics out of it altogether.
Douthat: Right, but the temptation to not leave politics out of it altogether, again, it just seems to me it may manifest in some different ways in environments where you have more women in leadership positions versus more men, but there is still a similar impulse to police speech and debate.
But I want to pose a question for Leah, rather than just arguing with Helen. So, the truth-seeking question: You agree with Helen that institutions should be truth-seeking?
Libresco Sargeant: Yes.
Douthat: Especially in medicine and law, the professions that have, I think, been most feminized in terms of the number of women entering into them. To what extent is truth-seeking in those professions or other places contingent on a certain degree of intensive competition within those institutions?
And I think you can see the follow-up question, which is that the idea of care and dependency, I think you could say, almost necessarily makes some institutions less hypercompetitive. The New York Times has incredibly generous — I’m not just saying this because my corporate overlords want me to — but we have incredibly generous maternity and paternity leave.
And when I confronted, after we had our most recent child, the incredibly generous paternity leave package, I was like: Well, if I take all of this, I’m going to fail as an employee, in some way. I’m going to become less competitive as a newspaper columnist among other newspaper columnists if I take this amount of time off.
Are there professions that you look at and you’re like: Honestly, I wouldn’t want this profession to be required to have this amount of maternity leave because it would cut into its competitive edge?
Libresco Sargeant: It’s not competitiveness that I see as the main hindrance.
Here’s where I would tell someone not to work if they want a family, which I think is doing good work, but in a method that isn’t compatible with family life and isn’t plausibly going to become compatible: It’s SpaceX, which I admire a lot, which iterates very quickly, and for the whole beginning of its company had such a tight runway that each individual rocket meant possibly the end of the company.
There are some things you can take on where your responsibilities are so total that they don’t leave you room to say yes to someone or something else. Monastic life is also like this, but there are fewer massive explosions, hopefully.
But I think those are rare, and I think there’s a tendency for many employers to see what a company like SpaceX can ask, and think: Well, I’d kind of like that much of my employee’s life, too — without actually having a business model that depends on it, without doing anything nearly as ambitious as they are.
Douthat: OK, but I want to push you on that point. I started out talking about visions for how conservatives engage with gender difference. And I think a lot of conservatives listening to your narrative might say: Well, I don’t think it is just SpaceX. I think there’s a lot of zones in American life, from the tool factory and the car dealership all the way up to Elon Musk’s landscape, where there is a certain kind of ruthless competitiveness that is important to the truth-seeking that is the work of capitalism. And that maybe there is some room for being more solicitous of female difference and dependency in the work force, but if you go too far, you’re just losing that edge. You can’t segment it off and say: If you work for Elon Musk, you don’t get maternity leave, but everywhere else you do. There’s a larger culture here that is endangered by making the workplace bend more to dependence.
Libresco Sargeant: I think part of it is that, in any kind of work, in any kind of truth-seeking work, you have to be realistic about the materials that you work with. Like, SpaceX — deeply rooted in truth about its materials, cares a lot about exactly what this steel can take, what will happen to this particular part of the heat shield.
But I think many employers and workplaces are not interested in the reality of the materials of the human beings they work with. And there is something unjust about building a system that chews people up and then tosses them on the scrap heap, or chews up their fertile years, promising them egg freezing and ignoring the fact that tends not to pan out, but by the time that happens, they won’t be working there anymore — it’ll be their problem, not yours.
So what does it mean as a steward of your employees? It means being realistic that people are fragile. They have other people who depend on them. They themselves can get sick, injured, pregnant, and a responsive work force will have ways of responding in justice to that.
Douthat: Helen, what do you make of Leah’s vision? It seems like your argument, in effect, is that corporate America and American institutions are too solicitous of female vices. Is there a way that they could become less solicitous of those vices, but more solicitous of the female distinctives that Leah is championing?
Andrews: I think this is one area where Leah and I probably really agree, that employers need to be solicitous of the people who work for them and take care of them. But there’s a big problem with doing that as things stand right now, and it is anti-discrimination law.
A good employer, if you’ve got a protégé that you care about and she’s a woman — a caring person is going to sit her down and say: I think if you want to have kids, you should probably choose a career track that allows you to shift to part-time midway through so that you can have children — and not: You should avoid a career track that’s all or nothing, that’s going to burn through and not allow for part-time work during your childbearing years.
Right now that conversation is illegal. I mean, it happens all the time, because of course you’ll naturally have that conversation with people that you care about because you want them to be happy. But if you talk to a female subordinate that way and have that conversation with her when you don’t have the same conversation with men, hopefully she won’t sue you, but if she decides to, you’re in big trouble because that’s a problem.
So I think we should make it more possible for employers to have the kind of conversation that I just described. The problem is that right now, the constraints on frank discussion that H.R. and these lawsuits have created make those kinds of really sensible conversations that you, Leah, probably want employers to have, impossible.
Douthat: This gets to a larger question that I have for both of you, which is that there is something about the postindustrial economy that, as far as I can tell — and this shows up in multiple societies; it doesn’t just happen in the United States — it seems to produce a lot of jobs that women thrive in, and it produces fewer jobs that maybe, let’s say, fulfill the kind of warrior protector mode. These are crude stereotypes, but I think we can look around the economic landscape and see them vindicated to some extent.
I’m just a little bit skeptical, therefore, that if you stripped away certain aspects of anti-discrimination law, or you can look at Europe — Europe offers lots and lots of maternity benefits and all of these things, and still, in Europe, you have lots and lots of women choosing career over family, having fewer kids, and so on. Isn’t there something about this landscape that is just a dynamic interaction between the economy we have and the choices people make, and it’s not a structural conspiracy, it’s just that the world of the 21st century wants women in certain jobs?
Libresco Sargeant: I agree that the economy has fewer — though not no — places for founders with brio, and a lot of places to be able to work a comfortable job, just in the way that consolidation works. But I think it’s a mistake also to look at work as the primary space to express the warrior spirit.
Everyone, whether they have family or not, should not think about bringing their whole self to work or being fully fulfilled at work. If you are a young man who has a boring entry-level job where you fill out forms, there’s probably a ceiling on how exciting that’s going to get for you. You should do something interesting in your community, in the same way an Eagle Scout would, but now you’ve got to do it yourself — clean up an entire park, construct an amphitheater for the local high school.
I think we make a mistake in seeing the workplace as the primary space we work out our cultural foibles. You are free to do good things in the rest of your life — and, in fact, you’re freer to take ownership of a project that can fail and take risk on outside the workplace, especially as a young person.
Douthat: But don’t you agree that, to some degree, you are suggesting that the workplace is not fitted for women in certain profound ways? But women in Western culture have a myriad of choices right before them, relative to the constraints imposed on both sexes in the past, and they are choosing in large numbers this ill-fitting, from your perspective, choice?
Absolutely, you can have fulfillment and validation outside the work force. Nonetheless, it is the case that lots and lots of women graduate college every year and enter willingly into the system, and the structure that you’re arguing is hostile to their nature and biology, to some degree. Not completely, right?
Libresco Sargeant: What I was going to say is: I think it’s hostile to yours, too, Ross, because you are a human being who will one day die. And what I claim, at the most basic, is that when we start our idea of the human person as someone who’s autonomous, who’s free to do things, who’s unconstrained by other people’s needs, that women get caught first as being people, not autonomous individuals. Men get caught later.
Douthat: Right. But it hits women first and hardest.
Libresco Sargeant: Yes. And I think you see the cost, not in women not succeeding in the workplace, but in the continual delay and decrease in the number of marriages and pushing back of childbearing.
Douthat: Right.
Libresco Sargeant: At a time when people say they want more children than they’re having, and are missing out.
Douthat: But women do also — you can see this in polling — if you look at priorities, there is a shift in priorities where women, especially in polls in the last 20 years, are more likely to prioritize work, and less likely to prioritize family. So again, they are accepting and embracing this structure that you are arguing is ill-fitted for them. Where is that impulse coming from?
Libresco Sargeant: Where is my respect for revealed preferences, right?
Douthat: Yes.
Libresco Sargeant: Yeah. I think part of the issue is we have a lot more scripts for how to succeed at work than how to succeed at family life and forming marriages. We see people forming marriages later with fewer kids because they have fewer on-ramps, and the on-ramps they have are bad. The prevalence of pornography, the increase in online dating with the endless swiping and consumerism, is bad.
So you can say: Well, look at people’s revealed preferences. I put an endless carousel of pornography and profiles in front of them, and I put a relatively straightforward work path, and they’re picking the work path. Do you respect that?
And my answer is: Well, let’s try it again, but without those things on the table.
Douthat: Helen, tell me about what happens in a world where you get the changes that you want, in terms of how women enter the work force and how the work force changes as a result. Your argument in the piece is basically that all of the downsides of feminization that you describe can be ameliorated, not by discriminating against women or forcing them out of the work force, but just by leveling the balance and saying: We are not going to have anti-discrimination law enforced in this particular way that you think is more hostile to masculine vices than to female ones.
Andrews: I am uncertain how things will shake out if we take all of the thumbs off of the scale — that is, if we get rid of all of the things that are structurally biased toward women in the workplace right now. I think some forms of feminization are here to stay.
I think the female advantage on university campuses — women earning more B.A.s than men — it’s been that way for a few decades now, and that is probably going to continue to be the case. In fact, as I understand, it is men who benefit from affirmative action in university admissions, because campuses don’t want to have too few men.
But in other places, do I think that corporate America will be as feminized if we take the thumbs off the scale? I predict not. I predict that the field of law will probably not be as feminized. Already, even today, I think 40 percent of women who earn J.D.s are either working part-time or out of the work force 15 years after they get their degrees. So there are lots and lots of forces of gravity pulling against feminization.
Although, to be clear, we should always be clearsighted about the problem that we’re trying to solve, and in this case, the particular problem that I’m worried about is wokeness. The reason why I think the great feminization thesis is important to talk about is because I see a lot of people walking around right now thinking that wokeness is over. They say: The vibe shift is here. We don’t need to worry about it anymore.
But I’m saying that if it’s the result of structural forces and demographic feminization, then we cannot be so complacent because wokeness is here to stay, if that’s the case.
Libresco Sargeant: The one thing I really couldn’t get purchase on from your essay is I got a very clear sense of masculine vice and masculine virtue. That masculine virtue is about risk-taking, about embracing chances, brotherhood, fighting, making up, comfort with turbulence, right? And masculine vices are about vulgarity, condescension toward women, in some sense. And female vices are about gossiping, backbiting, irrationality, ostracism.
I never got a sense from your piece whether there were female virtues at all — genuinely. That’s why I’m asking. I got a sense of balance for the men, but not for the women.
Andrews: I saw that you made that criticism elsewhere. If ——
Libresco Sargeant: It’s a question. It’s only a criticism depending on your answer.
Andrews: If you want to know what I like about women ——
Libresco Sargeant: No, that’s not my question.
Andrews: You can ask me.
Douthat: What do you like about women, Helen?
Andrews: Well, just to finish that particular thought before I answer that question: It’s a little bit feminine, honestly, to focus on my likes and dislikes ——
Libresco Sargeant: I’m not asking about your likes or dislikes ——
Andrews: I don’t write about myself ——
Libresco Sargeant: I don’t care about ——
Andrews: I write about the world ——
Libresco Sargeant: I’m not asking about ——
Andrews: And I am telling you that when I look at the world, I do not see any institutions that are currently suffering from an excess or insufficient feminization.
Libresco Sargeant: Helen, I don’t care about your likes and dislikes because that’s not what I found compelling about your portrait of risk, which we both value as a genuine virtue, not a matter of preference, like chocolate or vanilla.
Do you think there are objective virtues for women in the same way you think there are objective, primatology-based vices for women?
Douthat: Just as a reader of the essay, I felt like I was actually clear on what Helen thought female virtues were. I was less sure how those virtues manifest themselves in public institutions and the professions.
So, it seemed to me that, Helen, this is a point of agreement between the two of you that women, for biological reasons, are oriented toward forms of care and love and communitarian spirit that men are maybe not as good at.
I was interested in: Well, what do those female virtues bring to a newspaper or a corporation? Or would they be a trad view, that women have virtues, and they’re best exercised in the home?
Andrews: To say a word to Leah first: You’ve written several books, and I’m sure you’ve read reviews of those books. Hopefully, as fellow authors, we can agree that it is unfair when book reviewers criticize you for not writing the book they would’ve written. So it’s possible that I didn’t write the essay you would’ve written ——
Libresco Sargeant: I just want to know ——
Andrews: And it was missing information that was curious to you, but I didn’t think that was the assignment, and I think you should take the essay on its own terms.
Libresco Sargeant: I’m asking you as a thinker — as a thinker I respect — about what virtues you see in women.
Andrews: They were apparently clear to Ross, because I think the answer he just gave about care was pretty close to the mark.
Douthat: Well then, let me take the moderator’s prerogative and repeat my question — and I will elaborate on it further, and then you can answer.
It seems to me we can take for granted that many, many workplaces in the future will be mixed between men and women. This is a fundamental feature of 21st-century life that is not going away. If you don’t want those workplaces and those institutions dominated by female vices, what is the positive-sum interaction between male virtues and female virtues that you would like to see at the Supreme Court or The New York Times or anywhere else?
Andrews: I think that if you had asked me 10 years ago to guess what the effects of the feminization of the legal field would be, I probably would’ve given the same answer that a feminist would’ve given — the same answer you can find in Dahlia Lithwick’s book about the feminization of the law — that it’s going to be more accommodating of gray areas, it’s going to be less doctrinaire, less hewing to the letters on the page, and more attentive to context.
And I think if you had asked me to guess how that would play out, I would’ve said: You know what? That’s maybe not necessarily such a terrible thing. Maybe we should be more oriented toward rehabilitation rather than punishment. Maybe the feminization of the law is not entirely without benefits.
And I think it’s possible that that is accurate, that that is a reflection of how the feminization of law has played out in practice. The reason why I am turning on a big red siren when it comes to the feminization of the law is that all of those things that sounded so nice in theory or in the abstract, in practice looked like the Title IX kangaroo courts for sexual assault on college campuses.
If that is what the feminization of the law looks like in practice, I think that’s horrible. And if an increasingly feminized legal profession is going to take the problems of those Title IX courts and bring them into grown-up law, I think that is an emergency-level danger that we all need to be really, really worried about.
Douthat: The positive side here is that you could imagine a dynamic interaction between a doctrinaire male sensibility and a female sensibility attuned to nuance and gray area that, in a kind of yin-and-yang model, interacted successfully to correct the weaknesses of a purely doctrinaire vision of the law, without sliding all the way into emotive-driven kangaroo courts.
I’m just putting words in your mouth, but I’m looking for the positive-sum dynamic because, just as liberals and conservatives are stuck with each other in America, so too are men and women, right? So that’s what we’re looking for.
Andrews: Yeah. And I think you can imagine the same kind of thing — to jump to another institution — in academia.
Academia is extremely feminized today, and it’s not a coincidence that college campuses are capitals of wokeness, so it’s probably unlikely that college faculty are going to be defeminized anytime soon. But I think we can achieve helpful compromise in the yin-and-yang dynamic that you described by reinstituting certain guardrails to guard against female vices.
Strong statements of academic freedom — we can start there if we’re thinking of concrete steps we can take tomorrow to make sure that men and women on university faculty are able to work together more productively.
Libresco Sargeant: I still haven’t heard a full account of female virtue. I heard you, Ross, voice it for Helen.
And I’ll be honest, I don’t think in terms of primarily feminine and masculine virtues as a fractional complementarity. All men and women are called to faith, hope and charity. They’re all called to fortitude. The particular kind of fortitude asked of a man or a woman may change based on their state in life.
But I would have trouble raising my two daughters and my son to know how to be good, versus how to reduce their harm, working solely from this definition of what it means to be a man or a woman.
Douthat: One of the larger stories of our world — we’ve referenced it a couple times — is that we’re in a society where men and women are not interacting successfully, I think. The genders are more politically polarized than at any point in modern history. Possibly related to that is the declining marriage and birth rates all across the developed world — I don’t want to push that point too far, but there is some failure for the sexes to come together.
So, two questions that are maybe nested together: In each of your visions of workplaces and cultures transformed, do you think that the modern workplace can help men and women interact more successfully? Or is there a way in which gender differences require maybe a little bit more separation in some spheres?
Which is a better scenario: figuring out the best way for men and women to work together at work? Or having more distinctively male and female workplaces, and then men and women rejoin in the romantic or domestic sphere?
How’s that for a question?
Andrews: Yeah, I don’t really have an answer to that one. I think it is probably likely, just as a matter of prediction, that you will get more workplaces that are predominantly male or predominantly female in the future I envision, where there’s no longer thumbs on the scale. Whether that will be good for men and women interacting, I don’t really know. I don’t think I have an opinion.
Libresco Sargeant: I have opinions.
Douthat: Good.
Libresco Sargeant: I don’t think the work force is the main way I see men and women coming apart, and it’s not even, with some movements in Helen’s or my direction, the main place I see them coming together.
I want to make a pitch, especially as we’ve talked a lot about women — good, bad, medium. I wanted to make a pitch for what’s good about men here, in particular, and where the goodness of men is particularly neglected and how that could help men and women come back together.
I think part of the appeal of the warrior band — or of a marriage — is that either a group or a pair of people is taking on something too large for either to sustain by themselves and developing trust because they bear a responsibility they know their own strength cannot serve.
As a married woman, I’ve loved my husband the whole time, but being pregnant meant depending on him in a way that was different than at any other part of our marriage. And I think the later marriage is, and the rarer it is, the less often men — who are, on average, stronger — find a reason their strength is required.
I think the more that both in a community, starting with young men, there’s a real sense that because you are larger and stronger, that we need something from you to make this whole community run, and that will continue through your marriage, the easier it is to make the case for men and women to come together.
How on earth could we have three kids, except that we trust each other and ebb and flow in strength and can do more than we can by ourselves?
Douthat: Leah Libresco Sergeant, Helen Andrews, thank you so much for joining me.
Andrews: Thank you.
Libresco Sargeant: Thank you for having me on.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, Raina Raskin, Andrea Betanzos and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Sophia Lanman and Kyle Grandillo. Cinematography by Marina King, Elliot deBruyn and Bets Wilkins. Video editing by Arpita Aneja and Steph Khoury. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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