After the patriarchy: The HR lady is in charge now

The patriarchy has been smashed, writes Helen Andrews in Compact. The female future that feminists predicted is now -- or very soon.

In The Great Feminization, the pseudonymous J. Stone argues that women's growing power in our institutions and professions is changing society, and not always for the better. It explains the rise of wokeness, writes Andrews, the author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.

"Women became a majority of the college-educated workforce nationwide in 2019," she writes. Law schools and medical schools are now majority female. Women make up 46 percent of managers, and rising.

In 1974, when I joined the workforce, "10 percent of New York Times reporters were female," Andrews writes. "The New York Times staff became majority female in 2018 and today the female share is 55 percent."

"Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition," she writes.

Andrews worries that a feminized legal profession will "bend the rules for favored groups and enforce them rigorously on disfavored groups, as already occurs to a worrying extent."

She fears a business world in which the human resources VP -- not the male CEO -- sets the tone. "If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?" 

Women have gained power because of anti-discrimination law, not because they're outcompeting men, Andrews believes. In a much-quoted line she writes: "Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten."

I remember the bad old days when many opportunities were closed to women, and I'm not convinced of Andrews' thesis, but I'm OK with her proposed solution. She thinks " fair rules " -- not firing the uppity women -- is the answer. "Let’s make hiring meritocratic in substance and not just name, and we will see how it shakes out," she writes. "Make it legal to have a masculine office culture again. Remove the HR lady’s veto power."

We all hate the HR lady, don't we?