Have Women Ruined The World? Helen Andrews on The Great Feminization

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Less than 24 hours after her Compact essay, “The Great Feminization,” set off a thousand group texts, writer Helen Andrews joined to talk about what she means by “feminization,” why the 2020 moral fervor looked the way it did, and how workplace culture shifts when women become the numerical majority. We also compare “agreeableness” with the kind of conflict that actually moves ideas forward (and where each belongs).

In this episode we discuss:

How Helen defines “the great feminization” and why she thinks it explains contemporary “wokeness”
What changes when institutions tip female—journalism, academia, law, nonprofits
HR-ification, hostile-environment law, and why managers vs. judges should handle culture
Agreeableness as a social virtue—and a professional liability in truth-seeking fields
Innovation, risk tolerance, and the gendered vibes around tech, nuclear power, and exploration
Whether “women in STEM” initiatives help, hurt, or just rebrand office politics

About the guest:
Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative and author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. Her new Compact essay is “The Great Feminization.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	And one of the biggest obstacles in having this conversation that I have personally encountered
0:05.8	is a confusion between second way feminism as it was in the 70s or 80s and feminization as it
0:14.3	exists today because these are just completely different things.
0:24.1	Welcome to the unspeak-easy podcast, the podcast formerly known as the unspeakable.
0:30.4	I am your host, Megan Down.
0:32.6	Last week, an article was published in Compact Magazine that got a lot of attention.
0:38.2	It was called The Great Feminization, and it was written by Helen Andrews, who argued that the phenomenon we often call
0:45.5	wokeness is an extension of feminine social norms into institutions that were historically male-dominated.
0:53.2	In other words, as women become more represented and even
0:56.5	overrepresented in the workplace and elsewhere, the agreeableness and be-kind ethos that often
1:03.5	comes along with them becomes the default mode. Helen thinks that amounts to a kind of socially
1:09.5	engineered dysfunction that prioritizes
1:12.1	emotional approaches over realistic, fact-based approaches, and hinders productivity and slows innovation.
1:20.0	Do you agree? Do you hate this idea? Do you agree while also hating it? Wherever you are,
1:27.2	I think you will find this a valuable and
1:29.3	surprising discussion. I certainly did. So here it is, Helen Andrews. Helen Andrews,
1:41.9	welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. It's been barely 24 hours since your
1:48.4	piece. The Great Feminization was published in Compact, and it's the talk of the internet,
1:54.9	and even more so, I think, the talk of group texts everywhere. I had a couple that were blowing up yesterday. I read the
2:03.1	piece with great interest because, as many of my listeners probably know, I've been talking about
2:08.0	this phenomenon for many years. I think many of us have, at least many in this kind of intellectual
2:16.5	landscape, but it's kind of hard to narrow it down to a sort of legible phenomenon.
	...

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