This article originally appeared in the Civitas Outlook. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Brian Lee Crowley, December 3, 2025
Journalist Helen Andrews gave a bracing talk at the National Conservatism conference in Washington this past September that is attracting huge international attention.
Entitled The Great Feminization, Andrews’ talk makes the claim that the changed behavior in recent years of major institutions and professions like universities, corporations and the law, and especially the rise of woke culture, can be attributed to one main factor. That factor is the increasing representation of women in their ranks. More women in these organizations and professions means, in Andrews’ view, more feminine patterns of behavior as values traditionally associated with women come to dominate.
While recognizing the changed behavior Andrews properly decries, I part company with her on the cause of that behavior. The issue is not “too many women”. That is just stereotyping and crude biological determinism. Women (and men for that matter) are only partly bearers of a set of attitudes and values innate to their sex that are universal, permanent, and immutable. They certainly start out life with certain emotional and intellectual predispositions. Some notable traits and dispositions are summarized in the table below.
Be that as it may, women, like all human beings, are, in the eyes of British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, “condemned to learn”. Life throws experiences at them, which they react to and draw lessons from. Earning our parents’ respect as children, birth order, being influenced by influential teachers, getting a first job, getting fired, developing close relationships with mentors and work colleagues, traveling, getting married, having a baby, buying a house, having to pay the bills, these are all everyday experiences that often transform our innate nature and instincts.
Because we learn and because what we learn changes our ideas and behavior, a more promising place to look for the rise of woke behavior in these vital institutions of society isn’t “demographic feminization” (the increase in the proportion of women in institutions). Instead, the rise of “ideological feminization,” the dominance in the minds of the next generation of both women and men of an ideology rooted in values traditionally linked to women, offers a much more compelling explanation.
Getting the explanation right for institutional decline and corruption matters enormously. If the problem is too many women in universities and professions, then the solution is to hire more men, as Andrews recommends. But if the problem is a “mind virus” that has infected those of both sexes charged with the direction of our most vital institutions, then changing the proportions of men and women will leave that mind virus just as powerful and influential as it was before, and the behavior of our institutions unchanged.
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Brian Lee Crowley is the founder and managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
