Unintended Consequence of the Feminisation of Institutions and Companies

[DrMorbius]

Is there an unintended consequence of the feminisation of institutions and companies?
Recently I have been reading/watching more and more about the relatively recently occurred, imbalance of women in companies and institutions (when in positions of power). This increase and the subsequent culture shift it brings, being what is driving the "woke" culture explosion.
Where there is a high proportion of women in high positions (and HR), for example; NHS, academia, parts of the public sector, media, we can see a shift in the culture and the way all of these institutions operate. There has been a definite change towards "wokeness", you only have to see the mess at the NHS or universities.
If this is the case, what is the solution?

I personally think the 'bit that's wrong' (as you put it) is that the OP considers women in leadership positions problematic and posters on this Mumsnet Feminism and Women's Rights board are clapping along to them.

So it’s more a moral objection? As in, it shouldn’t be said or entertained in this forum, whether true or not?

(Obviously you can’t believe that women-dominated institutions couldn’t in principle have negative effects. Unless you have some unicorn theory of women under which there can never be any ill effects of something if it came from women. Which would be silly).

Big fan of Helen Andrews, eh?

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-great-feminization/

Do you have one single original thought in your head?

Nahhh, more of a bemusement at the cliff edge of coherence for a purported women's rights forum, really.

What’s a cliff edge of coherence?

Well you're the lemming, you tell me.

I’m afraid this is incoherent to me. Anyway, time to sleep now. Have a good night.

Yes I am sure we have all seen that, but that isn't what we are talking about, we are talking about population behaviours.

There is a good deal of research that suggests that female power hierarchies tend to work somewhat differently than male ones. Tendencies to certain hrou

In any case, whether men or women are doing it, that really does not tell us whether the nature of modern workplaces is prone to that kind of behaviour, which was my comment.

While plenty of women who should know better have gone along with this and bullied their female colleagues when they should have had their backs, I think it’s men who have driven it – particularly powerful men with lots of money. Women generally just don’t have the wealth and influence needed to embed something like this at all levels of society – it’s why it’s taken someone like JKR to fight back against it. And when it comes to workplaces, the theory falls down when you look at the likes of the BBC and the civil service – both v male dominated and both in total thrall to trans activists.

Emotional response in the place of rational argument is a feature of the trans side, not the GC side - it's always about souls and feelings and being kind and comfort and preference, whereas we, being reasonable and conspicuously law abiding women, are satisfied for the law to protect our human rights and nothing less, while granting transpeople their human rights, and nothing more.

Emotional appeals rather than logical arguments and facts.

The don't question attitude of no debate.

The getting offended on other people's behalf - or creating problems ( that's what peaked DH in his workplace).

The wanting to be seen as a victim/oppressed.

That all says American culture to me not feminisation.

From them bankrupting France and blaming Marie Antoinette for it - from Trump getting in because democartes put in weak candiates who happened to be women - for low birth rates not the high cost of having kids - finding ways to blame women for wider cultural or economic issues also seems very american.

Great points, AprilMizzel .
I agree with hholiday, but I wouldn't point the finger specifically at wealthy men, I think the attraction of gender ideology is that it has put women, and especially feminists 'back in their box', and all men who are sexist, wealthy or not, welcome that.

It's a struggle to understand how such an irrational ideology which makes claims that are so easily disproven, like TWAW, has had such disproportionate influence on so many parts of society - education, religion, the law, medicine, the arts, language itself.

The fact transgenderism has been successful in setting women's rights back by decades suggests that the rocket fuel that propelled it to its otherwise inexplicable position of influence is its misogyny.

“Social woker” 😂😂😂

This might be my favourite typo on here ever!

Did OP actually say that, or are you inferring a subtextual meaning that may not actually be present?

I can't believe I'm reading this absolute crap straight out of the redpill/incel/MRA playbook on a feminist forum and some posters are actually agreeing with it.

What @DrMorbius actually wants is for women to know their place, which is NOT in the workplace.

Again, did OP actually say that, or are you inferring a subtextual meaning that may not actually be present?

It's about four factors:

1. People outsourcing their critical thinking to others, including so-called "EDI consultants" and Stonewall.
2. Organisations are terrified of activist backlash.
3. A privileged class using the display of luxury beliefs to signal class membership to each other.
4. The women of the privileged class aligning thenselves with their class instead of with other women for personal gain, whilst also deferring to men (both the ones in frocks and the other kind) because that's what they are socialised to do and they are probably terrified of doxxing and death threats if they speak out.

Result: The organisation, misinformed by Stonewall, terrified of getting vandalised, and staffed at high level by men and women of the privileged class, enforces these luxury beliefs on their staff, with the carrot being "promotion" and the stick being "getting fired".

The Sandie Peggie and Darlington nurses cases exemplify this.

1. NHS management staff outsources EDI policy making and training to Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence, et al., taking their brains out and assuming that what they are told must be correct.
2. The NHS doesn't want to be accused of institutional transphobia and have Bash Back come around to smash the hospital windows in.
3. The privileged class are consultants, with offices they can use to change in, and HR types who don't have to change at shift start and end. They usually have the privilege of monied parents who supported their education, helping them get into med school or whatever degree results in HR professionals. They spent at most a few years sharing changing rooms before getting an office, and may have forgotten what shared changing rooms are like. They may even have never set foot in the changing room at their current hospital so not realise that their are no cubicles. This makes them immune to the risks of sharing a changing room with a man.
4. The HR women and female consultants are more interested in climbing the greasy pole and not getting fired than in supporting junior doctors, midwives, and nurses who have to use the shared changing rooms. They don't want to stand up against the entitled men, especially as having their own office to change in means that they are personally unaffected.

Result: The nurses who find themselves changing alongside an intact man complain and are then victimised (in the Equality Act sense) by NHS HR, colleagues filing bogus fitness to practice complaints, and their own line management.

The privileged women contribute to the workplace culture but they don't do so in isolation. They act in a context of the institution not wanting pink paint, piss, and smashed windows everywhere; and the route to promotion being to play patriarchy's game at the cost of other women's safety and rights.

Not seeing this may be down to a lack of insight and systems analysis, or it may, as other posters have implied, be an example of a variant of the First Rule, where women are blamed for what institutions based on men's management structures and acting in a climate of fear caused by a violent men-in-frocks' rights movement do.

I'd also like to mention that IT is only slightly less male-dominated than construction, yet IT is the most TWAW, pronouns on conference badges industry I can think. IT is also highly misogynist.

This would support my "luxury beliefs + MIFRA (men in frocks' right activist)" hypothesis.

This would support my "luxury beliefs + MIFRA (men in frocks' right activist) threat" hypothesis.

@FernandoSor this debate needs to happen. Shutting it down is playing right into the TRA playbook. I have been looking at this for ages, I just cannot understand why any woman would 'be kind' resulting in her own safety being compromised.

I don't think many of the reasons posed actually answer this question. There might not be a good, all encompassing answer and it is a bit messy

My grandmother said that women lacked power and so they had to exert their power in the home or with other women. Maybe this explains why women turn against their own sex so easily.

I haven't had any firm views on this but I really support a debate on why it happened and why some women were so easily swayed

The strategies set out in the Dentons document included

• Incremental change: Introduce reforms step by step rather than all at once, to avoid backlash.
• Piggybacking on other causes: Attach trans rights to broader equality, diversity, or anti-discrimination initiatives to normalise them.
• Strategic framing: Use language that resonates positively (e.g., “equality,” “human rights”) and avoid terms that may provoke opposition.
• Youth mobilisation: Position young people as the face of reform efforts, emphasising innocence and urgency to gain public sympathy.

Analysis of the Dentons Document: A How to Manual - Women Speak Tasmania Full document at iglyo_v3-1.pdf

Is it possible that some of these, like the use of positive language about equality and rights and innocence, resonated with [some] women in a specific way, due to women being socialised to 'be kind'?

What a strange, blinkered perspective the author has. Laser-focused on confirming a narrow thesis and ignoring the bigger picture.

"In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture."

"The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT."

Nancy Hopkins's response is risible "snowflake" behaviour of the type we see all the time from Trans Activists and their ilk, eg. Extinction Rebellion. "Triggered" in this instance by the mere utterance of a notion that there might be differences between the sexes.

This is not specifically female behaviour but a stereotypical "drama lama" response evidenced by both men and women. Of a certain class. What Trevor Phillips refers to as "the exam-passing classes", ie. university educated. We are not talking blue collar trade qualifications here.

"This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?"

Equally risible. "Wokeness" is more than "cancel culture".

Her thesis:
a) cancel culture = female thing, therefore "wokeness" = female thing
b) more women in "institutions" -> woke institutions

Which blithely ignores the fact that predominantly female professions managed to survive for decades untainted by "wokery" - until wokery wriggled its way into every professional institution under the sun.

As for "cancel culture" being a "female thing", the historical ousting of midwifery by male-dominated medicine is surely an extreme example of "cancel culture"?

"Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women."

What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?"

The "gender imbalance" is even more extreme in the UK:

Tackling gender imbalance in psychology
July 2020 - BPS
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/tackling-gender-imbalance-psychology

"Eighty per cent of psychology undergraduate students are female and at Russell Group institutions, the proportion is even higher, standing at around 85 per cent. The result is that psychology professions are pervasively female-dominated: 80 per cent of Clinical Psychologists and Educational Psychologists are women."

But . . .

"The gender imbalance also fails to offer women any career-long benefits, with 'a leaky pipeline' effect meaning that only 63 per cent of university psychology lecturers and 33 per cent of psychology professors are female."

Which means that there is still an incentive for ambitious men to qualify as Psychologists.

All Health Professions are now majority female, though still with the most senior positions being occupied by men: the "Glass Escalator" effect with more rapid progression to senior levels for men.

Interesting idea here, that imposition of standards might have driven out men from Health Professions, leaving the door open for women to flood in to replace them, ie. rather than men leaving as a result of more women entering what were once predominantly male professions that also had less regulatory accountability:

American Psychological Association, Committee on Women in Psychology. (2017). The changing gender composition of psychology: Update and expansion of the 1995 task force report.
https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/gender-composition/task-force-report.pdf

"an argument might be advanced that a change in the nature of a field and the imposition of more regulatory standards on any profession may precede the departure of men from that field. That is, it is the changing nature of the profession and the departure of men that enable the entrance of women and not the reverse (Adams, 2008). For example, in the health service provider area, group and interprofessional practice settings are increasingly shaped by third-party reimbursement standards that subordinate psychological expertise to medical expertise and corporate interests. Even in solo practice settings, case conceptualization and the number of visits must adhere to third-party standards. At the same time, tenure track professorial positions in college and university settings appear to be declining in favor of nontenure track positions and part-time employment."

Contemporary Wokery / Political correctness is also "regulatory", as well as being decidedly authoritarian.

"Cancel culture" is exemplified by reporting to employers for breaches of policy and to regulatory bodies for breaches of standards just as much as by "deplatforming", bullying of venues (external or by staff mutiny) and informal methods such as "shunning", etc.

It is also much bigger than "trans activism", which is just one facet. "Counter Wokecraft" barely mentions gender identity ideology. The examples of "wokery" (Critical Social Justice) are focused on US Academia - and anti-racism.

Counter Wokecraft:
A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond
Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay, 2021
https://amzn.eu/d/cHiGopY

"Counter Wokecraft: Why I Wrote It and Why You Should Read It"
Charles Pincourt, 2021
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2021/11/26/counter-wokecraft-why-i-wrote-it-and-why-you-should-read-it/

I don't think women invented Political Correctness or "Wokery", which contemporary Cancel Culture is part of. Or that women were responsible for regulation of the Health Industry and Professions.

Or maybe I am wrong and women rule the world but somehow I never noticed!! 😂

I have asked (subtly), and this is what I was told.

1. They bought the idea that men who identify as women are the most vulnerable people on the planet, and the most likely to be murdered. Once they say the magic words 'I am a woman' (this is my interpretation as to when the transubstantiation occurs), they offend at the same rates that a female does.
2. They bought the idea that agreeing with the list of progressive left causes made them a 'good person' and on the RSOH. Each thing on the list was not considered individually or actually given any thought. Plus the idea that people who don't agree with the omnicause (for want of a better term) are evil/Nazis (again, the lack of thought in arriving at this position was shocking).
3. The 'my lovely trans friend' reason. It should be noted that the friend was female and identified as non-binary.
4. Has a child who identifies as trans or non-binary and fears for their safety.

Glad Dentons got a mention. I am still staggered that a company of lawyers thought this was a good idea.

Nah, I don't buy it. This is just an MRA fishing for useful idiots. It boils down to 'women can't be trusted to make sensible decisions - look at how they bought into the trans bollocks - therefore they shouldn't be in positions of power in business and bollocks.'

This ‘great feminisation’ nonsense is a well known anti-feminist talking point. For a different take on it, read Helen Lewis’s recent long article in the Atlantic which touches on the Helen Andrews article mentioned above. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/