Helen Lewis

And this is the kind of first moment really when there were so many women in academia that they had a hysterical overreaction.

his public comments that maybe there weren't so many women in STEM because, you know, just innate lack of aptitude or interest, essentially.

And this is portrayed as this kind of warning sign of like the feminist freakouts that are about going to dominate the next two decades.

And then Andrews goes on to make this case that you have far more female lawyers, far more female doctors, far more female academics, and they are not interested in the pursuit of truth and justice and rigour.

They are driven by feelings.

And so in the law, that will translate to the fact that they will just feel quite bad for criminals and kind of not want to discipline them and punish them appropriately.

In academia, it means that you stop asking hard questions with uncomfortable answers and you instead end up having a kind of hippie kumbaya drum circle where everybody talks about their positionality.

And there is obviously something there that spoke to a lot of people.

I mean, the reason that I wrote about it is that, again, I had this sense of smoke and sand.

And then I tried to go through the specific evidential claims that were being made and see whether or not they stack up.

One of which being that wokeness is an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

There's something to practice as a tongue twister.

But the idea essentially that if you get too many women in an organization, it will collapse into kind of bitching and backbiting and all the things that characterized that period of whatever you want to call that peak woke of 2020.

And it was incredibly...

viral essay.

I wrote a lot of articles taking issue with some of the things that happened in that period.

I don't know if you can separate out correlation and causation in all of those times.

I don't think you can ever draw a neat line, which is when women in organization get above 60%, then organization collapses.

And that's kind of the claim that basically Andrews makes, which is that, you know, these bureaucracies run by women become just self-perpetuating and squalid.

Well, you know, go and read like, you know, the government inspector or something like that.