Women's speech norms are the true cause of feminization

It didn't begin in institutions, nor is it about the share of women

Introduction

For the past year, I’ve been circling feminization as a phenomenon. I’m not the first one to consider it, and the weakest arguments have now exploded around it to the detriment of the conversation we desperately need to have. It’s not about liberals or conservatives, nor is it about women, morally speaking. This isn’t the length of my usual essays because I want you to sit with just this idea for now.

I’m here to give you the incentive structure and mechanism by which institutions stopped seeking truth and began enforcing safety, consensus, and harmony. This isn’t about a gender tipping point, nor does it mean we kick women out of institutions to revert them.

It is simple, dangerous, and explains something no one has been willing to say out loud: feminization does not begin in institutions. It begins in the interpersonal sphere and then escapes into the public sphere, where it is encoded as managerial culture.

Women’s speech norms are the root cause of the erosion of truth in public life. What seems harmless is corrosive, and we can’t name it because we can’t name women as agents of their lives. Men accommodate this style of communication in institutions. It’s easy to dismiss my argument as “blaming women”. I’m not saying that all women are responsible for the erosion of truth, but that institutional culture is downstream of interpersonal behavioral norms. And the default norms for the professional class are those of women. This is a structural argument. I also argue that women are moral agents, and we ought to stop seeing them as morally innocent of all social phenomena.

Women's moral superiority: a noble lie

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Women’s society is intellectually poor

The intellectual poverty of women’s society is the structural privileging of consensus and harmony over debate and the testing of truth claims. The bond is emotional, not rational. Intellectual display, in fact, is unwelcome in the female social space. This isn’t because every woman is individually opposed to it, but because of social incentives and enforcement by a minority of women who can’t compete but want power anyway.

The pattern is structural, not about individual pathologies. Despite these disclaimers, it remains dangerous to argue that women have group incentives to infantilize each other in the name of obscuring the intellectual hierarchy among ourselves. We don’t realize that it’s happening or why we’re doing it because it’s the default.

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How feminization begins interpersonally

The feminization of institutions begins at the micro-interpersonal scale. Women’s speech norms demand hedging, softness, and actual baby-talk. Feminist academics and writers call this women’s relational talk and excuse it as harmless, and then ask why anyone dared to notice and question it. The incentive for the diminution required in female space stems from competitive suppression. In groups, women default to this mode of speech, which purposely lacks substance, for that would require a hierarchy of ideas and would expose that some women are simply more intelligent than others. Denial of variance in intellect among women is also related to the denial of sex differences.

The emptiness of the conversation is by design to limit any single woman from challenging the rest to do better or be more intelligent. I am told that not all friendships need to be deep, yet 95% of my female friendships are based on shallow conversation about people and events, and shared activities. This is, again, by design.

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Speech norms and status preservation

These speech norms require passive voice, conflict avoidance, opacity, emotion, and safety to produce the harmony and consensus on which female friendships are usually based. Accountability in such a scenario becomes impossible because it requires clarity.

These speech norms seem harmless when confined to social spaces, but they serve a specific status-preservation requirement: if some women are explicitly more articulate, precise, or correct than others, then the plausibly deniable female hierarchy destabilizes. This must not be allowed, or it would undermine the feminist consensus that men are threatened by women’s intellect and that they hold us back unfairly.

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What comes next

Next week, I will elaborate on this line of argument to explain the reasons behind the speech norms and how they escaped the lab into the workplace. For now, here are my two cornerstone essays on the topic, published earlier this year.