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.
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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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