My father-in-law is 92 years old. And a hero.
A veteran, a father, and a man of deep conviction.
And like many men of his generation, he sometimes looks around at the world he helped build and wonders what happened to it. He sees the institutions that once honored order, reason, and strength now reshaped by something else entirely—what author Helen Andrews calls The Great Feminization.
Andrews’ thesis is startling in its simplicity: when male-dominated fields become majority-female, they don’t just change in demographics—they change in nature. Institutions that once prized merit, confrontation, and truth-seeking begin to adopt values more aligned with relational safety and emotional comfort. She has come to the conclusion that “wokeness” isn’t simply an ideology. It’s the demographic endgame of feminized institutions.
This is visible across the landscape: in colleges, where women outnumber men and where debate is increasingly discouraged in favor of groupthink; in media outlets, like The New York Times, where dissenting views are often cast as personal harms; in law, where once adversarial arenas are now framed in terms of trauma and therapeutic justice; and in human resources departments, which have become the enforcers of new moral codes rooted in emotional safety, not objective truth.
She goes further. In the judiciary, where neutrality and submission to law are foundational, she finds that female-majority courts are increasingly drawn toward emotional reasoning over legal precedent. Is this why we see so many left-leaning judges—male and female alike—releasing violent offenders or nullifying laws that demand moral clarity?
Conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey calls this “toxic empathy.” And it’s worth pondering. Charity is not about capitulating to feelings. It’s about willing the good of the other—objectively, sacrificially, and with justice. When institutions elevate empathy above truth, they cease to be charitable. They become sentimental.
Which brings us to the flipside of this equation: men.
Gen Z men are becoming conservative at increasing rates. They have read the writing on the wall that is so evident in statistics like those shared by Andrews: “Since 2016, law schools have gotten a little bit more female every year; in 2024, they were 56 percent female. Psychology, once a predominantly male field, is now overwhelmingly female, with 75 percent of psychology doctorates going to women. Institutions seem to have a tipping point, after which they become more and more feminized.”
And it’s not just academia. In many industries, men have been told they must deny who they are in order to survive, which results in traditionally masculine men ceding ground to men who have willingly become feminized in order to succeed.
As Andrews puts it, “That does not look like women outperforming men. It looks like women driving men away by imposing feminine norms on previously male institutions. What man wants to work in a field where his traits are not welcome? What self-respecting male graduate student would pursue a career in academia when his peers will ostracize him for stating his disagreements too bluntly or espousing a controversial opinion?”
We have achieved much in terms of parity in this nation. Women have proven themselves worthy of leadership positions and many men of consequence have recognized that fact. I am certainly personally grateful for that realization. But in celebrating parity, we cannot lose sight of complementarity. God established a brilliant balance when “male and female he created them,” and that balance should be present at all levels of society.
While the most competent women leaders often reflect the virtues of male-dominated spaces, they do so while maintaining what Pope St. John Paul II called the “feminine genius”—a biologically-based way of perceiving the world that allows for genuine empathy. But to flourish as a society, we need a best-of-both-worlds form of leadership in which that “feminine genius” works in concert with the “masculine genius.” Men must be allowed to contribute in the courageous, to-the-point, appropriately confrontational style designed into them by their Creator.
The enduring health of any society depends on the full expression of both: the intuitive compassion that builds communion, and the principled firmness that guards order and truth. When men are diminished or sidelined, society loses the guardianship of boundaries, courage, and disciplined purpose—qualities that stabilize families, communities, and nations.
Civilization itself depends on this balance: the complementarity between the man who protects and the woman who nurtures, each reflecting a facet of divine wisdom that, together, sustains human flourishing.
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