Postliberal commentator Helen Andrews made quite a splash in October with her Compact essay titled “The Great Feminization.” Andrews argues that the suppression of unpopular views in the name of protecting groups perceived as vulnerable—the ideology often known as “wokeness”—is the inevitable consequence of women achieving greater participation in public life. Her thesis has provoked a wide range of responses, ranging from those who broadly agree with her to those who find what she is saying absurd and laughable.

Andrews is not wrong to be noticing a significant sex difference here. Some polls do indicate that the views of men and women diverge on some of these questions. For example, a 2022 poll of college students conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 85 percent of women would not allow a speaker who claimed that “[t]ransgender people have a mental disorder” to speak on campus, compared with only 58 percent of men. Similar gaps were found when students were asked whether they would allow a speaker who believes that “Black Lives Matter is a hate group,” that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen,” or that “[a]bortion should be completely illegal.” We should be concerned by these results, but Andrews is mistaken to conclude that this is an inevitable consequence of women’s increased power, or that reducing the number of women in public life is either necessary or sufficient to fix the problem.

Andrews argues that if a particular trait is more prevalent among a particular demographic group, then increasing the percentage of individuals who are members of that group in an organisation will cause the character of the organisation to shift in the direction of that trait. However, this alone is not enough to make such a shift inevitable. Three additional criteria must also be met. First, the individuals being added to the organisation must be representative of the demographic group with respect to this trait. Second, the trait must be common among the demographic group. Finally, the trait cannot be amplified or diminished by social pressure.