Helen Andrews hit the nail on the head when she argued that wokeness is the rampant feminization of American society. Her recent and widely read piece in Compact captured what many Americans sense but struggle to name. Yet questions remain: Will the great feminization continue, and for our purposes, how did educational institutions set it in motion?
For years, colleges and universities have enrolled more women than men, producing a distinctly feminized professional class. But that imbalance is not only numerical; it is also cultural.
Higher education rewards traits commonly associated with feminine social patterns—relational sensitivity, emotional expressiveness, consensus-seeking, and a preference for harmony over confrontation. By contrast, traits more often associated with masculine social patterns—competitiveness, risk-taking, dissent—are frequently treated as disruptive or unwelcome. Students quickly learn which behaviors earn praise, and women, through it all, are better positioned to succeed in this environment.
Graduates emerging from this environment carry those lessons with them. And, as Andrews argues, this is especially evident in the legal profession.
Legal education, now majority-female and increasingly therapeutic in tone, has begun prioritizing emotional safety over adversarial reasoning. Trigger warnings accompany discussions on rape cases, students protest invited speakers on the grounds of psychological harm, and professors are discouraged from using the Socratic method because cold-calling induces stress.
The result is a generation of law students trained to avoid discomfort rather than confront it, and that formation inevitably carries into the profession.
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We see it as no coincidence, for example, that many lawyers pressed in the previous presidential administration for expansive interpretations of Title IX to include gender identity, even when the legal foundation was tenuous. The push to include gender identity in Title IX rested less on statutory reasoning than on the perceived need to safeguard the emotional well-being of transgender individuals—a therapeutic reflex cultivated in the classroom. Yet American self-government depends not on protecting the emotions of a certain group, but on a moral order that requires intellectual discipline and the courage to confront conflict. When legal education fails to instill those virtues, the institutions downstream inevitably weaken.
Still, the feminization of our institutions that concerns Andrews begins well before law school or college—K–12 is where the habits and dispositions of students are first formed. And in those early years, therapeutic priorities—not the pursuit of truth or the transmission of knowledge—now dominate. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has ensured as much.
SEL—a $10-billion regime of emotional surveillance and identity-based affirmation—rewards traits aligned with constant emotional expression, relational attunement, and avoidance of conflict. These tendencies are not inherently harmful, but when they become the organizing principle of school life, academic formation gives way to mood management. “Feelings check-ins,” “resilience circles,” and the valorization of “lived experience” move classrooms away from disciplined inquiry and toward collectivized emotionalism.
Girls, given their tendency to be more concerned with relational sensitivity, emotional expressiveness, consensus-seeking, and a preference for harmony over confrontation, flourish in SEL-driven classrooms. Boys, by contrast, find that their developmental strengths—competitiveness, directness, physical energy, and a readiness to argue—are treated as liabilities. When a school environment consistently signals that core aspects of boyhood are problems to be corrected rather than strengths to be channeled, disengagement is the predictable response.
The much-discussed reading crisis is one of the clearest illustrations of this dynamic. It is not simply a decline in reading overall; it is overwhelmingly a boy crisis. Girls are more literate than boys. And this is not happening in a vacuum. An education system calibrated around feminine modes of engagement fails to motivate boys—and, in many cases, actively marginalizes them.
In our own K–12 experience, teachers often reinforced the old playground taunt that girls go to college for knowledge while boys “go to Jupiter.” That message, delivered implicitly or explicitly, does its work. Many boys eventually absorb the caricature. They stop reading, stop seeking challenge, and stop cultivating the habits that lead toward intellectual maturity. The result is not only institutional bias, but also male acquiescence to the lowered expectations placed upon them.
The feminization of American institutions is thus neither mysterious nor accidental. It is the predictable result of a system that, from the beginning, rewards one set of traits and suppresses another. Reversing this trajectory requires more than policy adjustments, however. Trump’s returning Title IX to its original definition was a necessary step in curbing the therapeutic and illogical excesses of recent years, but no policy shift can repair institutions that elevate only one side of human nature.
[RELATED: Student Essay: Male Feminists Are Sus]
What might help?
The first step is recognizing that this problem is not the fault of women alone. Women have, no doubt, succeeded within the educational and institutional framework that exists, but they did not build it by themselves. Men have been complicit in its rise. Many have chosen the path of least resistance: delaying marriage, shrinking from responsibility, and remaining passive. The temptations of modern life—easy entertainment, digital distraction, unhealthy habits, and sex without commitment—have offered men the illusion of freedom while hollowing out the disciplines that once cultivated their strengths. And, of course, the weakening of marriage and family life dissolved the civilizing influence men and women once exercised on each other, leaving both sexes diminished and institutions unbalanced. The result is not female dominance so much as women stepping into the void created by male withdrawal. The remedy lies not in resurrecting a hyper-masculine order, but in restoring the complementarity that once gave our institutions coherence, resilience, and moral ballast.
Perhaps the most practical path to restoring that balance begins where the imbalance took root: in education.
While fewer Americans should attend college overall, boys who show genuine aptitude for higher learning must be encouraged to attend university just as strongly as girls have been. Institutions downstream cannot rebalance unless the pipeline upstream does. A professional class drawn overwhelmingly from women will continue to reflect the incentives of a system that boys were never invited—or motivated—to join. This is not a call for preferences; Minding the Campus and the National Association of Scholars firmly oppose gender discrimination. It is a call for equal formation and equal expectations, ensuring boys receive the intellectual discipline and cultural reinforcement that have enabled girls to thrive.
A functional and civilized society, where both sexes flourish, depends on rebuilding the educational and civic structures that cultivate the virtues of men and women together. We hope that American institutions accomplish that balance.
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Image by Karola G on pexels.
The Great Feminization Theory is interesting and may be a (though almost certainly not the only) contributing factor to the rise of Wokeism, but the theory needs fine-tuning. Some issues I’d like to see Andrews address:
1) Her argument that matriarchies have never before existed: Quite a few indigenous cultures are matriarchal, like the Iroquois. Of course, these cultures had their rise and decline, but so have plenty of patriarchies. (As a side note: Indigenous cultures tend not to be as technologically advanced, but that’s not to say they are ‘inferior’ since ‘superiority’ and ‘inferiority’ are extremely subjective.)
2) Many of the most pernicious aspects of Wokeism (ostracism, persecution of dissidents, dogmatism, etc.) have flourished under patriarchal institutions (like religions and totalitarian regimes).
As a male with three graduate degrees in education, I beg to differ on three points here.
1: Girls and women do NOT seek consensus. They seek dominance and power every bit as boys & men do, they fight every bit as much, and some are every bit as psychopathic.
They just do it DIFFERENTLY and a lot of this “consensus seeking” is a form of fighting, an effort to exclude individuals from the group.
2: The male literacy gap predates the feminist influence. It only now is being discussed but I personally identified it 40 years ago in the NAEP when the STEM “girl gap” started to be mentioned. I had professors telling me it didn’t exist even after I walked into class with the microfiche prints that we had back then.
3: The government and not men are at fault for this — the government not only is a better husband (a better provider) than any working class man ever could be, but has increasingly become a parent as well.
People are amazed to learn that elementary school students — Grades 1-6 — walked home for lunch in the 1970s. It was only in the spring & fall, but we had an hour for lunch and walked home. And in the 1950s, it had been Grades 1-8 doing this. And the school lunch consisted of a half pint of milk and a cold packaged meal eaten in the classroom.
Kindergarten was private — mostly run by churches. No Pre-K, no subsidized daycare, and no microwave ovens — people had to actually cook meals. Grocery stores were the size of drug stores today. Flour was sold in 5, 10, and 25 pound bags.
Sixty years ago, the only professions open to women were nursing and teaching with a lot of qualified women becoming teachers for lack of other opportunities. But what happened in the 1980s — when other professions opened to women — was that education became almost EXCLUSIVELY female.
Part of this is that K-12 teaching is one of the few professions where one can take a few years off and re-enter with the same level of seniority that one left with, and where the work schedule follows the child’s school schedule. Another part of this is that teaching (and government employment in general) has good health benefits whereas a lot of lucrative jobs (e.g. construction) don’t — I know a lot of families where the husband’s job pays the bills and the wife’s job provides the health benefits.
But the other part is what John Silbur got sued for saying about the BU English Department — memory is that he called it “a damned matriarchy.” Many of the women who *could* do other things did — leaving the bitter feminists who were either too old or too stupid to do anything else — or unwilling to work more than half a year (teachers only work 180 out of the 360 days in a year).
And as male teachers were replaced, they were replaced with female teachers.
And while police departments have always had an officer or two whose job involved school safety and dealing with children, but where this had been a male officer in the all-male departments, this often became the newly hired female officer.
And instead of stigmatizing and shaming unwed mothers, we now celebrate and reward them. The average tenure of a single mother’s live-in boyfriend is something like 17 months, although that was mean and not median. And all of the social workers and related welfare staff are female as well.
So the only role model that many young boys have is the local drug dealer.
That’s problematic…