What is “wokeness”?
You know it when you see it. It’s transgender themes in children’s cartoons. It’s anti-white racism enshrined in law. It’s San Francisco declaring no public school students can take Algebra One until ninth grade, in the interest of equity. It’s men in women’s locker rooms. It’s women in the military, Boy Scouts, the workplace, the gym, any and most formerly male spaces.
“Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization,” writes commentator Helen Andrews, summarizing the thesis put forth by pseudonymous author “J. Stone.” (RELATED: Universities Are Fighting Trump Tooth And Nail — But He’s The Least Of Their Problems)
“The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible,” Andrews continues. “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 institutions where women were few in number until recently.”
And what are those “feminine patterns of behavior”?
For one, high(er) agreeableness: cooperation, maintaining social harmony, considering the emotional concerns of others.
Women are also higher in neuroticism than men. Neuroticism is your disposition towards feeling negative emotion (anxiety, depression, anger, etc.) in response to perceived threat.
These are helpful traits in many contexts. If you’re unperturbed as a tiger stalks towards your baby boy, he’s going to die. If you’re indifferent towards social cohesion, your little band of hunter-gatherers will dissolve, leaving you to fend off the winter alone.
These are less helpful traits in academia, law, and journalism, which are ostensibly in the business of truth-seeking.
Andrews offers the example of Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University (among many other important titles). Summers resigned in 2006 following a “no confidence” vote by Harvard faculty. His offense was saying unpopular, true things.
Summers gave a speech Jan. 14, 2005, at a conference on “Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.” The audience was small and mostly female faculty members from Harvard and other universities. The talk was supposed to be off the record — “so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later,” The New York Times (NYT) reported Jan. 18, 2005.
You can find a full transcript of Summers’ remarks on The Harvard Crimson.
Summers referred to diversity as a “crucial objective” at Harvard. He set himself the task of addressing “the issue of women’s representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.”
Summers noted that women are not the only group that is “significantly underrepresented in an important activity.”
“The data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking, which is an enormously high-paying profession in our society; that white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association [NBA]; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture.”
Should we assume malicious discrimination on the part of investment bankers, the NBA, and farmers is to blame?
No. But there is a sort of discrimination at play. Each industry offered by Summers selects, by its nature, for certain dispositions and aptitudes, discriminating against those who do not possess them.
Summers refers to this explanation as the “different availability of aptitude at the high end” hypothesis. That is, at the high end of being really, really good at something, you’ll find only a handful of people. We should not expect that handful to hail from diverse corners of the world. We might expect the opposite, given genetic heritability.
“It does appear that on many, many different human attributes — height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability — there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means — which can be debated — there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined.”
Summers considers other hypotheses.
“The most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect … that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That’s not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect.”
Summers calls this the “high-powered job hypothesis.”
“So my sense is that the unfortunate truth — I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true — is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.”
Some female professors in the audience were offended. They sent Summers’ remarks to a reporter, Andrews claims, leading to scandal and uproar.
Many women who publicly took issue with Summers’ speech did not scrutinize his logic or oration. They scrutinized how he made them feel.
“When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” Nancy Hopkins, a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the NYT. “Let’s not forget that people used to say that women couldn’t drive an automobile.”
The female ringleaders of this cancellation effort presented “complaints of psychosomatic injury” as “prima facie evidence that they were the traumatized victims of a serious thoughtcrime,” Stone writes.
Similar objections were lodged by the would-be cancelers of political scientist Charles Murray, who made the mistake of reporting factual data on variation in intelligence across groups. And former Google engineer James Damore, who wrote an unpopular memo relating similar points as mentioned in Summers’ speech. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: ‘Debunked’ Study Served As Key Pillar In Academia’s DEI Temple)
Hopkins took issue with the presentation of the high-powered job hypothesis, telling the Times, “I didn’t disagree, but didn’t like the way he presented that point because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a lot of women who work that hard.”
There are outliers in every group. Andrews is a woman, and presumably does not see her work as governed by the overriding concern of making people feel good.
When someone says, ‘Human beings have five fingers on either hand,’ most would not object, ‘but my cousin lost his thumb in a factory accident.’
Consider a world in which Hopkins’ attitude rules every major Western institution. We’re getting there.
“If your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?” Andrews questions.
Andrews finds a solution in demolishing anti-discrimination law. (RELATED: Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Makes Insane Comparison In Court, Belittles Her People In One Fell Swoop)
“I don’t think solving the feminization problem requires us to shut any doors in women’s faces. We simply have to restore fair rules. Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose,” Andrews writes.
Our civil rights laws make it illegal for anyone to lose except for straight, white, able-bodied, men. Disparity in outcome is not evidence of unjust discrimination. It may be evidence of discrimination on the basis of interest and aptitude.
