Job Search - Part 4

The Feminization of the Workplace

This is a general discussion of the feminization of American society and workplaces and the reigning pieties of our time, including equity and the ‘girlboss’ archetype.

‘Boy’s club’… nothing says ‘modern workplace’ like the ubiquitous ‘HR training’ trope. Just for fun, Google ‘HR Training’ (images) and observe the number of photos which feature women training, or leading, or assertively shaking someone’s hand. This is probably just a coincidence.

---

If you want your society to produce transcendent excellence in a given field, the only way to do so is to attach a competitive male status hierarchy to it. With status on the line, men will throw themselves into the arena, immersing themselves completely, devoting their every waking moment to mastering a skill or subject, making it their life’s purpose to push a discipline beyond its limits. Competitive pressures between the best of the best then raises performance to its apogee. Iron sharpens iron.

Conversely, if you want reliable mediocrity, then you want women’s work. Women don’t have the same sexual incentive to compete with one another in performance, and so, by and large, don’t (they compete in other ways). Their instinct is to perform to a perfectly acceptable standard, but not, in general, to push themselves to exceed it.

-

John Carter

Matt Osborne, writing about Napoleon and the Siege of Toulon:

There was also a total lack of command; everyone from the general-in-chief down to his lowliest aide-de-camp gave orders and changed siege dispositions at will. Buonaparte established an artillery park, put some order into the service, and employed all the non-commissioned officers he could get his hands on. Three days after he arrived, as a result of his own zeal and organizational skills, the army had an adequate artillery — fourteen cannon pieces and four mortars with all the necessary equipment. He produced a stream of orders for the cannon, horses, draught-oxen and stores necessary for the effective prosecution of the siege. He ordered 5,000 sacks of earth a day from Marseilles to build ramparts. He created an arsenal at Ollioules where eighty blacksmiths, cartwrights and carpenters worked, manufacturing and repairing muskets and incendiary cannon balls. He requisitioned skilled workers from Marseilles to make equipment for the artillery and took over a foundry in the region so that he could produce case shot, cannon balls and shells for his mortars. He reorganized the artillery company, obtained powder that was sadly lacking on his arrival, fought with suppliers, and scrounged more cannon from the surrounding region. Within a relatively short space of time, he had managed to gather almost one hundred guns and mortars, which worked twenty hours a day.

-Phillip Dwyer (Napoleon: The Path to Power)

My thoughts:

Leadership demands initiative, decision, delegation, and risk-taking. Modern ‘leaders’ are too often managers, lacking in justified self-confidence and nurtured in hierarchies which have been organizationally insulated from any liability or risk. This ‘safety first’ and collectivist mindset seems to slowly be sapping the drive and initiative and sense of personal accountability from large areas of society.

We used to be a civilization of free men and women and small (and some medium-sized) structures; a landscape of small groups of people taking risk and acting in Dunbar number-sized groups. Now we are a civilization of (in many places): workers, and managers. Leadership is often not a quality which is being selected for, and in many cases it is actively discouraged. -

A Locked Room

I’ve seen a trend advancing across American society and I would very much like to explore its consequences and secondary effects. Unfortunately I can’t find much discussion of its secondary effects. It is one the growing number of consequential matters about which we’ve apparently agreed to say nothing. This trend is the growing feminization of American work. It is rare to find even acknowledgements, much less explorations, of this trend or its implications. They are completely absent in the legacy media and across a good 50% of the political spectrum.

I’m not just talking about the larger numbers of women performing certain jobs and operating at certain levels. I think I detect a larger trend, which transcends work and hiring. I hesitate before I use the label of ‘feminization’. There are probably others which could be selected. There’s no such thing as a ‘feminized’ organization or rule set or hiring metric, after all. There are females (and males) and they have traits and tendencies, and that’s all. Nevertheless, I think we have moved so far in the direction of pretending that there are no inherent or biological traits or tendencies that the point should be made. Men and women are different and they have served different roles in every society that has ever existed and the existence of each category reflects differences in sexual role which stretch back hundreds of millions of years and are even found in the plant kingdom. This is all trivially basic and quite obvious, yet it’s a controversial claim in many institutions these days. Such controversy says more about the institutions than it does about reality.

Feminization: the reflexive embrace of egalitarianism (and now equity) & the non-aggressive resolution of conflicts and the bureaucratization of society and a greater emphasis on and consideration of personal feelings, especially relating to safety and psychological wellbeing.

The fact is that our work has been feminized (as I define it), as has our entire society. When I refer to the ‘feminization’ of American (and global) society, I’m not necessarily referring to changes driven by or for women. I understand that many of the trends I identify are opposed by, or disadvantageous to, many or even most women. However, it is a fact that as civilization has developed and our economies have become more fecund and our civilization more peaceful, our communities and workplaces have become more amenable to women and more shaped by their worldviews. Despite the chaos of mass immigration and the terrible incentives of bail reform and the malign influences of personally subjective reasoning and the cultivation of racial/sexual grievances our civilization has grown more peaceful. On the scale of centuries, far fewer people die violently (in war or acts of crime) than they did in the 20^th century, and the 20^th century was far more peaceful than our hunter gatherer origins tended to be (Stephen Pinker has thoroughly addressed this debate).

Violence Before Agriculture: Full Report

Life expectancy in various human and primate groups throughout history

Percentage of deaths in warfare for various historical human societies

Our society has changed and these changes have affected every aspect of our lives and these changes are what I generally refer to as ‘feminization’: the reflexive embrace of egalitarianism (and now equity) & the (physically) non-aggressive resolution of conflicts and the bureaucratization of society and a greater emphasis on and consideration of personal feelings, especially relating to safety and psychological wellbeing. The fact that many of these changes have been authored by men and also sometimes benefit men (in certain ways) is irrelevant to my claims. When the Indian countryside or the Saudi town or the South Korean workplace modernizes, it is disproportionately women that benefit. When cities become safer and organizations more equitable, it is disproportionately women that benefit. When personal feelings and ideas of romance dictate mate selection, and there’s an expectation of universal adult financial independence, it’s disproportionately women that benefit. When work is performed more in offices and less outdoors, and status and income are based more upon academic performance and bureaucratic agility (and identity category) it’s disproportionately women that benefit. When an organization becomes more concerned with emotional concern and politeness and psychological wellbeing, it is disproportionately women that benefit. The feminization of society obviously affects men just as much-not only in changes to their circumstances and social pressures but even to their very nature. These are not sex-specific changes, after all. Changing values around competition and conflict and wellbeing change the values for everyone. Modern men have been feminized. The modern fact that both men and women often follow the same life plan and share the same ambitions (degree, job, house, enthusiastic romantic partner on an equal footing) disproportionately benefits women. The role of women has changed drastically in the past century, and the role of men has shrunk and transformed-not just in their share of political and economic power but in their identities and values. The modern male, who sits in a classroom or staring at a screen for most of his youth and lacks rituals of manhood or naming ceremonies and is not particularly expected to participate in athletic and competitive pursuits and rarely engages with the violences of hunting or interpersonal conflict (and is strictly forbidden from engaging in physical aggression, even as a boy) would barely be recognized ­­as a male by our ancestors. The roles of women have changed drastically too… but these changes are generally in line with feminist priorities. Our society has feminized. The widespread shift toward gender equity (and not merely equality) has changed how men behave and earn their livings and think and exist.

The fact that growing numbers of fields and organizations have larger and larger numbers of women isn’t necessarily the same as ‘feminization’, then, but the two trends must be linked. I can’t say which is driving which and I suspect there’s a kind of feedback effects: the more that society feminizes (embraces comfort and nonviolence and egalitarianism and personal consideration) the more women enter certain fields… and the more women enter certain fields the more society feminizes.

The “Man Enough” Ad: Actually, Men Have Reason to Fear and Dislike Female Power

The ‘Job Search’ series is born from notes I took during a month-long period of unemployment not long ago. As I confronted the reality of DEI hiring and HR bureaucracies and job search websites and junk texts/emails advertising nonexistent positions (in order to hoover up vast quantities of personal data for resale, I think) and the growing supremacy of degrees and certifications and credentials in the labor market, I reflected upon many things.

One was the feminization of our society, and our workplaces. It is now a barely contestable fact that ‘male’ occupations (carpenter, plumber, soldier, police officer, bricklayer, salesman, warehouse worker, landscaper) are increasingly low-status and far less dependent on credentials than ‘female’ ones (nurse, therapist, social worker, psychologist, HR administrator, executive assistant). Most occupations are not either strongly ‘male’ or ‘female’ of course: architects and lawyers and professors and managers and administrative assistants and customer service associates are fairly evenly divided in terms of sex-but even in these cases the jobs are changing, as are the organizations which hire people, as is the sex distribution of people being hired, as are the workplace environments.

John Carter

wrote an excellent piece about the negative effect on status and appeal (for men, and indirectly also for women) of the feminization of certain jobs. He specifically deals with academia but covers many other examples and I highly recommend it:

Academia is Women’s Work

I created a simple rubric for a male versus a female job, based on the dozens of jobs I’ve had over the years. It’s not perfect but I think it applies in most cases. Male jobs are those at which there’s a remote possibility of physical conflict breaking out at some point. At female jobs there is virtually no possibility of physical conflict. This isn’t to say that salesmen and builders are always fighting each other. Fights are vanishingly rare at nearly any workplace. Nevertheless, when I consider my experience working in building and sales and warehouses I definitely believe that there is an open competitiveness and openness of language and affect which is lacking in female jobs. Ditto the military. A sales force which includes 1/3rd women is qualitatively and perceptibly different from an all-male one, in my experience. Naturally more and more people work (due to changes in resource distribution due to government spending and structural economic shifts) in non-male jobs these days : in offices and on campuses and in corporations where there is effectively no threat of physical violence. Such places tend to be more comfortable, more polite, more concerned with employee ‘welfare’ and ‘work/life balance’ and more indirect in their communications. I literally can’t imagine anyone asking ‘what the hell were you thinking?’ in such a place… even if they were wondering, precisely, ‘what the hell were you thinking?’ If we consider the ‘Mad Men’ era of corporate office culture of the 1950’s I think we will find that these settings would have been much closer to what I’ve described as a ‘male’ workplace and much farther from a ‘female’ one. Now they are decidedly in the latter category and the fact that boardrooms and colleges and architecture firms and research institutes are not now places where we could imagine any real physical aggression or plainly confrontational speech (despite having mostly, or many, men) doesn’t contradict my point; it supports it.

Let’s try a different approach: imagine two workplaces. One is cluttered and dirty, with ashtrays and equipment and empty coffee cups and food cartons scattered around. You can hear employees laughing and talking loudly over the drone of the industrial fans. There are dirty magazine centerfolds near the government-mandated DOL posters. There’s a cup of pens somewhere but they don’t work and there’s a giveaway branded lighter and a disposable straw in the cup. Workplace #2 is quiet and clean and gleaming. There’s an attractive young receptionist (tell me that three-word combination doesn’t immediately summon a mental image of a woman) and there are cheery flyers on the bulletin board and passive-aggressive notes taped to the fridge with smiley faces drawn on them. There are ferns and cubicles full of stuffed animals and family photos and a million bullshit knick knacks. In terms of the male/female workplace categorization do immediate answers come to mind for these two settings? Which is which? Which seems to represent our financial center of gravity and the future of American work? If the work environment has changed with the times so has the organizational structure and hiring priorities and the very DNA of these companies.

The updates I’ve heard from the modern American military and the world of firefighting and publishing all confirm my suspicions: our workplaces are changing in character and effect, and the change has something to do both with growing numbers of participating women and with mutations of our systems of social organization and our values. It all seems to be tied together somehow.

Far too common as a trope of modern action heroines, the “girlboss” or “Mary Sue” is a female character with seemingly-magical fighting prowess against much larger, clearly more powerful men.

-

Matt Osborne

American work has become feminized. With this change has arisen a much more insidious and incredible narrative, ubiquitous in business and education: the ‘girlboss’. This fabled character is the model which organizations and activists are referring to in their efforts to shape modern women, and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the incentives and psychological attributes and intrasexual dynamics of women. It’s a strange and politically-motivated confabulation of fantasy and a stubborn denial of social science. It goes something like this: women have the same intelligence distributions as men (they do not) and the same innate interests and talents (they do not) and are just as gifted in leadership and comfortable with open competition (they are neither) and they are a natural coalition (they are not) who are chiefly concerned with supporting one another (they are not). They value career success as much as men (they do not) and are just as amenable to high-pressure situations (they are not) and contain the same natural distributions of outstanding and iconoclastic thinkers and builders and reformers (they do not). Where these claims are shown to contradict available social science data-and its barely an exaggeration to state that every single one of them has been comprehensively disproven in virtually every society that has been studied-the discordance is attributed to patriarchy, and to the sinister influence of men as individuals and a as collective entity. It’s a strange experience to confront half a dozen female sociology majors and childhood educators and psychologists and be told by all of them that disparities in aptitude and career choice (like, for example, the choice to become a sociology major or a childhood educator or a psychologist, all female-intensive disciplines) are socially constructed. Little girls, I am told, don’t tend to pursue mathematics or engineering because society has made it thus. When asked why they don’t buck the trend and consciously pursue these fields (thereby shifting the balance and perhaps inspiring and paving the way for little girls now in school) there is no easy answer. Of course society has an influence on every aspect of career and education. But the idea that all sex differences are socially constructed seems as ludicrous to me (after reviewing the data) as the idea that the Earth is a flat sheet surrounded by cliffs of ice. That (the sex difference thing, not Flat Earth) is what I was taught in college though. I’m content to have ideologues merely admit that these issues are contentious, though, and not assume that their worldview is correct simply because it’s feminist. It’s been a long road but I think the weight of scientific evidence is slowly shifting the public conversation. The truth is, I think, that very few people believe that women are as naturally good at working on car engines (for instance) as men-and would comprise half of all mechanics were it not for sexism-simply because they’ve reviewed the available data. Rather, this is an attractive idea to certain folks for emotional and aspirational reasons, and it is therefore treated as a fact… and a fact so well established that questioning it should result in termination and ostracism, as James Damore found out.

An excellent video exploring human female intra-sexual dynamics

None of these claims should trouble anyone. These are statistical abstractions and general truths, none of which has any relevance to or for the individual. People are who they are. There are thousands of brilliant female engineers in the world and noting that engineering and ‘thing’-centered interests predominate in males (and male primates!) more than in females says absolutely nothing about these women. There are lots of short men in the world… but men tend to be taller. However, these disparities suddenly become extremely relevant when they drive corporate or political policy. Height differences (and other sex disparities) do become urgent when it’s time to assemble a Secret Service detail.

There’s absolutely no doubt that the integration of women into most workplaces has had drastic changes on those organizations! But can you name any of those changes, or recall any discussion of them? Neither can I… and that troubles me. Here’s what I believe: men and women are different-physically, socially, and psychologically. These differences run deeper than socialization and culture. Men are (on average) better at some things, and women better at others. Men and women relate to each other in very different ways and react differently to organizational structures and incentives. They define success differently and manage conflict differently and build teams differently. I don’t have much more specificity to add here but I think it’s fairly shocking that these are ideas to which I’ve barely begun to be exposed or to consider, despite reading about politics and economics for two decades. There are many harmful orthodoxies gripping our society. As Thomas Sowell said “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” Perhaps the idea that men and women are interchangeable when it comes to team-building or leadership sounds good to many people, but I don’t see why it should. In my experience women are generally more conscientious, more agreeable, more patient, more humble, more reliable, and more honest than men. Not all of these traits (which are pure personal anecdote) are necessarily great for certain tasks though. Women are also (in my experience) more anxious, more self-conscious, more passive aggressive, more self-effacing, and more emotional. When it comes to work ethic I’d assess the two groups as roughly equal-but they work differently at very different kinds of jobs. Perhaps you’ve observed a different split-but if you tell me you’ve observed no difference I won’t believe you.

If we can admit that men and women tend to have different interests (in all times and places, as far as we can tell) and different tendencies and aptitudes (does anyone really believe that 50% of nannies should be male?) then perhaps we can begin to question whether or not female-heavy organizations display different attitudes towards competition and communication and merit. I tend to think they do, and these differences might account for some of the changes we’ve seen in institutional focus in recent decades. As I said, these changes are expansive, and they touch every aspect of our society. We should be curious about what they might be and we should be able to discuss them.

Maybe next we can talk about the effects of feminization on relationships and family structures and birth rates? …Maybe not.

Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe and SHARE.

---

My other Job Search essays:

Job Search - Part 1

Job Search - Part 2

Job Search - Part 3

(Coming soon…)

Job Search - Part 5: Class Privilege