Women didn’t ruin the workplace. Capitalism did

“Did women ruin the workplace? And can conservative feminism fix it?” asked the headline of a New York Times roundtable discussion/podcast that appeared late last week. Shortly afterward, the piece reappeared under a new title: “Did liberal feminism ruin the workplace? And can conservative feminism fix it?” Hours after that, the headline again reappeared, massaged frantically into the try-hard “Have ‘feminine vices’ taken over the workplace?” Had the headline continued on its trajectory, it’s fair to assume that it would have become baroque on the fourth try (“Pray, must the sphere of men’s great toil be objectionably pierced by the damning shrieks of women?”) and in its fifth and final rewrite reach its pure Aristotelian form: “Women are afflicted with a natural defectiveness. Are they even people?”

None of these attempts to lend high-minded, ponderous urgency to a podcast discussion that can best be summed up as “Women, am I right?” were effective, for the simple reason that “Did women ruin the workplace?” is a disingenuous and unserious question. Headlines often use such questions as a way to entice readers into a topic that is far more nuanced than their titles suggest; this is the rare case where nothing in the actual content complicates its tantalizing headline. “Did women ruin the workplace?” did exactly what it said on the tin: posed ahistorical clickbait with no inherent intellectual value and then reworded the question over and over in hopes that some might emerge. For this reason, I will continue to refer to the piece by its original title.

There are so many very good, very resonant responses to the piece that adding mine to the pile might seem pointless: If it was that unserious, why bother engaging at all? For me, it’s because “Did women ruin the workplace?” is exactly the kind of unseriousness that The New York Times has cashed in its legacy to prioritize: a cynical sludge of manufactured consent, naked propaganda, and lazy writing glossed with institutional legitimacy and delivered in the guise of “hearing both sides.” (Full disclosure: I have written opinion pieces for The New York Times.) In this case, the key rhetorical tool deployed is a deliberate vagueness that lets unsourced claims and fact-free assertions appear true because people worthy of being in The New York Times are voicing them. That seems like editorial dereliction worth highlighting, even if it doesn’t approach the gravity of, say, an op-ed by a U.S. senator advocating martial law whose editor didn’t actually review the piece before hitting “publish.”

“Did women ruin the workplace?” was produced for “Interesting Times,” a podcast hosted by Ross Douthat, who is well known for such bangers as “Donald Trump is bad for the country because he doesn’t hide his racism under the acceptable veneer of WASP politesse like George H.W. Bush did,” and “Maybe incels would stop murdering women if the government established a program to redistribute sex to violent misogynists.” In just the last week, Douthat has opined that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory is actually NBD and that Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing “needed to happen” because something something Obama.

One of Douthat’s guests was Helen Andrews, whose recent essay, “The great feminization,” was adapted from a speech she delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in September. Her assertions that “[F]emale modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions” and “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition” were, not surprisingly, a big hit with the reactionary men who comprise the bulk of conference attendees. Douthat’s other guest was Leah Libresco Sargeant, author of “The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto,” a book she was not able to say much about before her conversation partner sucked every bit of air out of the room. Douthat introduced the discussion by saying that both women are conservative and both are critics of feminism, but “they have very different views of what a right-wing politics of gender should look like.”

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This is true in that Sargeant seems to hold some nuanced beliefs about how women have been failed by workplaces that are designed for men. These were completely drowned out by Andrews, whose combative debate style can be summed up with the phrase “I’m not like other girls.” (Her refusal to respond to Sargeant’s query about whether she sees any female virtues in the workplace, for instance, yielded a volley of deflections culminating in Andrews complaining “It’s a little bit feminine, honestly, to focus on my likes and dislikes.”) As the conversation wore on, Sargeant’s purpose within the discussion came into focus: She was there as a counterbalance to someone so gleefully and ostentatiously extreme that even her fellow conservatives are suggesting she pump the brakes.

The piece’s overarching problem is a failure to establish working definitions for the load-bearing terms it centers. Andrews uses “feminization” to mean both “there are more women in the workplace than at any time in history” and “women have taken over all workplaces in specifically feminized ways that make them worse.” “Workplace” is likewise unspecified, making it unclear how many sites of education and business have been razed to the studs by dizzy broads with the temerity to earn a living. The repeated use of “woke” and “wokeness” implies a broadly unified definition for a word conservatives co-opted from Black activist communities and made a weaponized culture-war catchall.

“Ruin” is perhaps the most deliberately vague of the undefined terms, though Andrews hints heavily that women’s mere presence in the workplace makes it broadly intolerable. (Not her presence, obviously — she’s different.) The “feminine vices” she indicts include conflict aversion, “gossiping” and our old standby, “being too emotional;” these place an undue burden on men, she argues, who are then no longer free to be their glorious, unfettered masculine selves. Women’s wokeness dictates that they can’t put pornography all over the walls or have push-up contests or issue long company-wide memos about how women are bad at STEM. “Ruin the workplace” means ruin it for all the fun people. Who are, after all, only men, according to Andrews, who seems to assume standard operating practice in workplaces is to expect the bare minimum from them.

Are they just supposed to have normal, civilized manners? Stop using outdated epithets to insult their colleagues? Not laugh at their colleague’s wildly inappropriate conduct at staff meetings? Is the contention that men just barely clear the bar of polite society supposed to flatter them? Sadly, Temu Camille Paglia will not elaborate.

The vagueness and nonspecificity that characterize “Did women ruin the workplace?” are hallmarks of right-wing rhetoric, says Moira Donegan, a Guardian columnist and writer-in-residence at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research who co-hosts the podcast “In Bed With the Right.” “One revealing thing about the conversation is that you can tell these people are in an epistemic bubble where they’re not being challenged on what they’re saying. [They] presume a kind of intellectual entitlement where these are not words you have to make your audience understand. It’s one thing to do that when you’re at the National Conservatism Conference; it’s another when you’re in The New York Times.” Donegan adds one more term to the list, pointing out that the conversation “uses ‘feminism’ as a euphemism for ‘women,’ rather than defining feminism as a set of political commitments or ideals. [When] it’s espoused by a woman and is about gender, that’s presumed to be sufficient to define it as feminism.”

The strain of modern antifeminism that began in the 1990s in response to the scourge of political correctness has followed a particular formula: When feminist consensus starts building for whatever reason — a landmark sexual-harassment testimony before Congress; a tipping point of outrage at mainstream media’s coverage of sexual assault; a global reckoning with predators and rape apologists — taking a contrary or reactionary stance against feminism is suddenly reframed as resisting tyranny. “There is a real appetite for antifeminism among some intellectual elites that is perhaps psychologically informed,” says Donegan. “[And] no matter how many times these arguments are made and are debunked, and no matter how sloppily they are argued, they still seen to have this frisson of a forbidden truth.”

But there is nothing transgressive about antifeminism right now. The current presidential administration has written out its intentions to roll back as many civil rights and protections against discrimination as possible. The 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade has resulted in a staggering number of women who have died waiting for their pregnancies to become life-threatening enough to warrant intervention, along with what is delicately termed “an excess” of infant deaths. The overall number of working women is declining. The Secretary of Defense hopes to push women out of the military and roll back protections against bias, harassment, discrimination, and assault for all service members. Women occupy a disproportionate number of low-wage service jobs, are still routinely paid less than men for the same work and are more likely than men to live, and die, in poverty.

So “Did women ruin the workplace?” does not land, for me, as a lively intellectual romp, but as a willful, deliberate f*ck-you to people who are materially impacted, right now, by their own government’s desire to take away their autonomy, dignity and opportunity. Prominently platforming a vibes-based argument that the excess of power unreasonably wielded by women has warped the nation’s institutions and should prompt a reconsideration of their civil rights, while their civil rights are being stripped away, is indefensible.

The people just asking questions about what women have ruined or want to ruin or will probably at some point ruin, Donegan notes, “are sometimes quickly, and sometimes slowly, getting the world they want.” As they do, they might discover what prominent antifeminists before them did: Performing internalized misogyny does not guarantee any exemption from reminders that women aren’t welcome in men’s spaces — much less in their spotlights.