‘The Great Feminization’: It’s Here, It’s Real, and the Damages Are Already Piling Up

Commentary

On Sept. 2, 2025, speaking before an audience at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, editor and journalist Helen Andrews broke one cultural taboo after another as she addressed what she and others were calling “the Great Feminization.”

A month later, she published a major article on this topic and has since appeared on several podcasts to discuss her thesis and its grim implications for American society.

In her article “The Great Feminization”—after referencing the pseudonymous author who first opened her eyes to the relationship between cancel culture, wokeness, and the feminization of American society and institutions—Andrews writes: “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 where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?”

In this same article, Andrews cites statistics showing female majorities in undergraduate and graduate schools, medical schools, law schools, and academia in general. She pays particular attention to the impact that the ever-growing number of women will have as attorneys and judges.

“The field that frightens me most is the law. All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female,” she writes.

“The rule of law is not just writing rules down. It means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.”

Though more study and data are needed on the effects of feminization on the law, in a March 2025 story critical of the leniency of New York City judges, three of the five judges cited were female.

More recently, the Lindsay Clancy murder trial has offered a spectacle rarely seen in our courts: the female jurors sympathetic to Clancy who publicly attacked the male juror whose refusal to go along with them resulted in a mistrial, the crowds of protestors—nearly all women—who gathered at the courthouse and called for Clancy’s release, and the GoFundMe account that has raised more than a million dollars for the mother who had killed her three children.

Andrews is by no means alone in her public denunciation and warnings of the Great Feminization. The much younger podcaster Roni Fouks, for instance, gives her viewers a favorable synopsis of Andrews’s arguments.

She quotes Andrews almost verbatim when she makes this vital point: “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

The end result of this revolution, Fouks says, again echoing Andrews, “isn’t merely political correctness. The final consequence is the destruction of meritocracy and objective truth.”

Fouks’s podcast is valuable because she dives into the differences between men and women, the long-time hiring practices that have favored women over men, the misuses of anti-discrimination policies in the workplace and the ways in which a female majority changes that workplace, and the emotions-based policies practiced by most human resources departments. These changes have snowballed and smashed into the public square, appearing under the name of wokeness and affecting vital liberties like free speech.    

Neither Fouks nor Andrews are advocating a return of women to hearth and home. Both make a point of telling audiences how much they enjoy the work they do. What they are proposing as a counterbalance to the Great Feminization is a restoration of meritocracy, hiring and promotion policies based on talent and ability rather than on gender.

“Take our thumb off the scale,” Andrews says, and the system would right itself within a generation.

“No more social engineering,” says Fouks. “No more anti-discrimination laws and artificial quotas.

“Any society that throws out meritocracy … those societies necessarily fail. We need to return to meritocracy, which is a pillar of Western culture.”

Critics of these viewpoints should understand that many women agree with Andrews, Fouks, and other commentators. The comments on Fouks’s podcast, for example, reveal overwhelming support for her position.

By now, it should also be clear that, regardless of their political views, no single person or group can speak on behalf of all women, a stance that has long lacked validity.

Finally, as more and more Americans learn of the Great Feminization and its connection to wokeness and certain negative changes in culture and the legal system, they, too, will likely be asking, as did Andrews, “How did I not see it before?”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.