The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
552. The Feminism Debate: Can Women Have It All? | Megyn Kelly
Mon, 2 Jun 2025
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and journalist Megyn Kelly dissect the cultural and psychological forces reshaping modern gender dynamics—particularly the rising unhappiness among young women, the suppression of traditional masculinity, and the consequences of empathy-driven institutions. They explore maternal overreach, the devaluation of motherhood, the politicization of victimhood, and the unintended fallout of feminism’s gains in the corporate and academic world. This episode unpacks how men and women are drifting further apart—politically, emotionally, and biologically—and asks whether modern society is equipped to repair the divide wrought by extreme feminism. This episode was filmed on May 28th, 2025. There’s nothing more difficult—or more important—than raising a child. In this new 5-part series, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson brings decades of clinical insight to the questions every parent faces: discipline, identity, responsibility, and what it truly means to guide a child toward a meaningful life. Available now, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://www.dailywire.com/show/parenting | Links | For Megyn Kelly: On X https://x.com/megynkellyshow?lang=en On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MegynKelly Website https://www.megynkelly.com/
Chapter 1: What is the catastrophe facing young women today?
Half of Western women, 30 and under, have no child. Half of them will never have a child, and 90% of them will regret it. This is a catastrophe.
Your life will be happier if you have a partner and children. That's just true. And people should be told that, and then they should be told the realities of fertility. But in my case, Jordan, from that day to this, I've always loved working. I love it. It's totally exciting and interesting and intellectually stimulating to me, and I cannot imagine not doing this.
We do potentially have a major societal issue in that men have their pathologies that are expressed socially, aggression, antisocial behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that women wouldn't bring their own pathologies to the workplace.
So
It's become mandatory in our culture to assume that the feminist movement has elevated women to the status that they now enjoy. I'm not so sure about that. I think that technological transformation and plumbing has had a lot more to do with that than ideological movement, let's say, especially one based on resentment. But in any case, it is the case that women occupy...
position in society that was unheard of 100 years ago. There's a downside to all of that.
And the downside appears to be the mounting unhappiness among young women, the precipitous decline in birth rates, the collapse of marriage as a social institution, and a spate of childlessness among young women, as well as the feminization of our institutions in a manner that often borders on the pathological.
I discussed these issues today with Megyn Kelly, a woman who's married, who has children, and who's had a stellar career. And we attempted to sort through these 30 issues and come to a conclusion about how men and women might conduct themselves in relationship to one another and what the consequences of that are for the way we think about ourselves in society.
You've had a very successful career and I'm kind of curious about how you've balanced your life and your work and how that's worked for you and what advice you would give young women who are apparently struggling quite radically.
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Chapter 2: How can women balance career and family?
And polls show pretty consistently that since the 1960s, the average self-reported happiness of young women in particular has declined and quite precipitously. So let's start with that.
Well, I'm not surprised to hear those stats about liberal women in particular, because, look, I see it with my own daughter, who's 14. The schools today try to exploit young girls and young women's empathy to bend them to their democratic values. norms. They try to impose all of their left-wing viewpoints on these young girls by tapping into the empathy vein.
You know, if you don't support Black Lives Matter, you're racist. If you don't support trans girls, meaning boys, playing in girl sports, you're a bigot. They're bullied. Don't be a bully. Be a nice girl. That's how we've been raised. for time in memoriam to be nice girls who get patted on the heads. And you're not a nice girl if you're a bully or a bigot or a racist.
So I'm not surprised at all that girls who don't get inoculated against that kind of thinking at home who go into any normal school system will be indoctrinated in that kind of thinking, and they will wind up very unhappy, very unhappy, because her natural instincts will be to fight against things like watching a boy take all of her blue ribbons.
But she's been told by all the people she respects, in the school setting at least, that she's a bad person if she objects to that. And I think that incongruous feeling is leads to unhappiness. I think the reward system of K through 12 and college education right now is for people who play the victim. And so much the better if you could actually be a victim. That would be terrific.
You will be celebrated. You will be the cool one. You'll get the snaps from your fellow classmates and your professors. But Writing your college essay about what a happy childhood you had and your intact family that supported you and loved you along the way will not get you in anywhere, maybe three universities in the United States.
But writing about the destitution derby that you have suffered from zero to 18 can open doors that would otherwise be closed to you, especially if you happen to be a white person, a girl or a boy. So all of the incentives are set up in a very backward manner.
And I think the other problem facing young liberal women is young liberal men who, by and large, are being turned into these, it's derogatorily referred to as soy boys, but I get it. Like, they're taking the masculinity out of our young men and then telling them that's the only way that they're going to be accepted and
And especially young liberal men are buying that and walking around in Birkenstocks with their Starbucks, being quick to cry at any emotional wound. And crying's not—that's fine. You can cry as a man. But most women would like somebody who doesn't do it all the time in response to all emotional upset. They prefer the hunter-gatherer types.
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Chapter 3: What societal issues do women bring to the workplace?
And obviously that doesn't mean there are no good female managers. We're talking about broad trends here. But we do potentially have a major societal issue in that men have their pathologies that are expressed socially.
aggression, antisocial behavior, drug and alcohol abuse, a tilt towards a kind of self-serving narcissism in some cases, but there's no reason to assume whatsoever that women wouldn't bring their own pathologies to the workplace. And it is the female-dominated institutions that seem to be the most woke. I mean, and that's how the 18 to 34-year-olds vote as well, right?
They're radically out of phase with the entire rest of the culture. So, what do you think about that? How would you reflect on that, like, in your personal experience with the organizations that you've worked with and the managerial situations that you've been in?
It makes perfect sense to me. I accept that as a likely cause of the problem that we're seeing and probably the more than likely culprit of it. I see exactly what you're saying. And, you know, it's, I guess with today's generation, I ask, is it, it's like a chicken egg. Like these woke institutions are trying to exploit girls' natural empathy, as I said.
But those women at some point were the first ones in thinking, to a system that hadn't been exploiting their empathy. And they ran wild with it, clearly, because we're now at the place we are. And I see it being done. I see, we just played videotape on the show today from peak BLM, right after George Floyd. Oh, yeah. The riots everywhere.
And one of those infamous videos where BLM members got up in the face of, it happened to be a woman of color. She looked Latina to me. sitting there trying to eat her lunch at an outdoor cafe. And the BLM crowd was moving in on her, standing over her, screaming in her face, trying to get her fist up to say Black Lives Matter. And it was all white women.
And I remember this from when I lived on the Upper West Side, which included 2020 during the George Floyd-a-palooza. And it was all white women who tended to have some money in their Lululemon out there at these BLM protests. It's like, okay, these women would never want that crowd coming back to their apartment building with them at the end of the day.
But they want to be out there on the streets and pretend that they're one of them, that they understand the experience that, you know, your average inner city person of color has had. It's a lie. So I accept because I've seen women behaving terribly over the past five years in particular, and they're at the apex of the bad messaging.
And they're the last to come along on the Trump train, which is also disturbing. You know, those same stats I've seen from that you're citing with the young women in particular. They're obsessed with abortion, which I just think speaks to a lot of things like the absence of religion in the public square. No one's even telling them the other side or the other options.
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Chapter 4: How does empathy influence modern education?
Chapter 5: Why is there a decline in women's happiness and birth rates?
Now, if you're talking to someone who's made a lot of bad decisions in therapy, for example, and trying to help them identify where they took, you know, where they met the devil at the crossroads and made the wrong choice, you're going to have to do a lot of reviewing. And to some degree, that's the what, representation of all that to conscious, consciousness, because it's become implicit.
It's become part of the way that you look at the world, but it's conscious when you do it or don't do it.
Well, I mean, I would like to think that this is what I've been thinking while you've been talking, with all due respect, because I have a lot of friends who are Democrat women. But I feel like you're talking about liberal women and not just women, because the conservative women I know are just not like that.
They're just they just have a totally different set of values and they live by them and they raise children by them. And I think we see the results of it. I don't know why, and not even necessarily your average Democrat woman, but a lot of them, but certainly leftist women. Yeah, I mean, I just feel like everything you said applies and it's obvious.
Well, here's another weird data point. So psychologists have known for a long while that, sociologists as well, that people become more conservative as they get older. So that's how the data is explained. As people age, they become more conservative. But you can take exactly that same data and you can put another twist on it. It's exactly as explanatory and I think it's more accurate.
The reason this isn't happened is because academics, including the researchers, are radically biased in the direction of the liberals. It isn't that you become more conservative as you get older.
It's that conservatism is the political expression of maturity, and liberalism, progressivism, and the hedonism that goes along with it, that self-centered hedonism that is part and parcel, let's say, of the pride movement, that is the political expression of immaturity. And so here's something else this explains, because this is a perverse fact.
There has been no economic and conceptual doctrine that's been more radically discredited than let's say the radical leftism, the Marxist brands of leftism, but it doesn't go away. So it's not leftism, it's not Marxism, it's Marxism is the most radical expression of hedonistic immaturity. And the reason it doesn't go away is because hedonistic immaturity doesn't go away. It battles with maturity.
And as you become more mature, you become more conservative because conservatives are community-oriented and not self-oriented. Now, interestingly as well on the psychological side, there is no distinction between thinking about yourself and being unhappy. Those things are so tightly aligned that you can't dissociate them statistically, right?
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