“The future is female,” the feminist rallying cry goes. If this is true, the future is “now” in academia, and if academia is any indication, the future is also something else: bleak.
This conclusion could be drawn from a recent article, “In Loco Masculi,” by Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald. In it she reports on a most ironic development: While the university system was created by men and for men, its feminization is now “all but complete.” The problem is that, far from the “gentler” sex’s dominance creating a kinder, gentler, college experience, research shows that female faculty are fostering academic tyranny.
As for the feminine takeover of academia, Mac Donald cites some striking statistics, writing:
Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.
These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not.
Of course, how three-quarters of Ivy League presidents and two-thirds of college administrators being female enhances “diversity” when women are just 51 percent of the population remains unexplained. Why, a cynic could suspect that this isn’t about equality and diversity at all, but something else.
What’s more, mirroring “the feminization of the [academic] bureaucracy is the feminization of the student body,” Mac Donald later adds. “Females earned 58 percent of all B.A.s in the 2019–2020 academic year; if present trends continue, they will soon constitute two-thirds of all B.A.s. At least 60 percent of all master’s degrees, and 54 percent of all Ph.D.s, now go to females.”
This “diversity” (of a sort) has “strengthened” academia, too — in an iron fist inside an iron glove kind of way. Just consider data on campus tolerance provided by Social Science Research Services. As FIRE writes (as presented by commentator Andrea Widburg):
First, in all cases, male faculty, compared to their female counterparts, were significantly more likely to say that the “administration should defend the professor’s free speech rights” after a controversy. This was also the case when the response option presented was instead “take no action of any kind.” Third, when asked about how the administration should handle several white male professors or several professors refusing diversity training, female faculty were more likely to say that “the professors should be removed from the classroom until they comply.”
…Female faculty members, compared to males, were more likely to oppose allowing all four [hypothetical] speakers [presented in the study] on campus. They were similarly more likely to say that students shouting down a speaker is acceptable, to at least some degree, than were male faculty members (49% never acceptable, compared to 61%).
…Significantly more female than male faculty favored protecting against hate speech even if this restricts speech not intended to be hateful (19% of females, 8% of males), as well as restricting speech only where words are intended to be hateful (38% of females, 29% of males). Meanwhile, significantly more male than female faculty supported restricting speech only where words are certain to incite violence (62% of males, 42% of females).
…Specifically, significant gender differences surfaced: 61% of female faculty indicated they view DEI statements as a justifiable requirement while 61% of male faculty said that such statements are ideological litmus tests.
…Additionally, male faculty, compared to their female counterparts, were significantly more likely to say the administration should take no action of any kind regardless of whether they were asked about “several professors” who refused DEI training (53% vs. 33%) or “several White male professors” who did the same thing (49% vs. 31%).
This politically correct posture is unsurprising. After all, “college-educated women are the most devoted Democrat demographic,” Widburg reminds us. As an example — and college-(mis)educated/single women largely drive this — while men supported Republicans 51-47 percent in the 2018 midterms, women broke for Democrats 59-40.
The reality, though, is that women are more liberal than men across the board. Single men are more conservative than single women; and while married women are less liberal than the latter, they’re still more liberal than married men.
Explanation? Is this nature, nurture, or both?
A female writer (I forget her name) once stated that “women are natural-born socialists.” This makes sense when considering that women’s traditional focus, the family, is a socialist-like unit. In a normal family with a proper hierarchy, the parents are an autocratic government; they make the decisions, and the children have no vote. The parents are also akin to a “nanny state,” providing everything for the kids, while the latter toil in only “government”-approved ways (e.g., chores, tasks on a farm). And it really is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
This is fine; it’s what a family is meant to be. The problem arises when this mentality is taken from the home and applied to the wider society, as it’s not scalable. It leads to the nagging nanny-state stifling of freedom known as micromanagement (and worse).
Speaking of which, and wokeness, could bring to mind microaggressions, whose existence amounts to not just the managing of speech but the micromanaging of it. It’s no shock, either, that women are more supportive of “hate speech” restrictions, and the reason why can be introduced with a story.
In 2015, scientist and Nobel laureate Tim Hunt joked during a conference in South Korea that women in the laboratory can present issues because they “fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.” He was canceled (big surprise), but his joke evoked laughter because it contains Truth.
Consider: Guys give each other digs all the time, in fun, in a way that a lady friend of mine once said “sounds so mean.” But men don’t take it that way; if a fellow ribs a buddy about being fat, he’ll just get a wiseguy retort. Women, however, may take such jokes to heart.
Given this greater sensitivity to words, is it surprising that women are more supportive of laws and social codes stifling words? Is it a shock that academia’s female ascendancy corresponds with the rise of campus speech codes, “safe spaces,” microaggression warnings, the snowflake phenomenon, and cancel culture?
In fact, “wokism” itself could be viewed as characteristically feline and feminine. Whatever the case, America had better man-up, no matter how un-PC and patriarchal that may sound. If it doesn’t, freedom will be hen-pecked into submission.
