Feminisation is Breaking Western Institutions

If we continue on this course, civil order will collapse

What’s the central fact of life in the West in twenty twenty-five?

Almost every institution is failing simultaneously. Courts, universities, media, policing, medicine - they’re all failing in the same way. They’ve stopped applying the rules and started making case-by-case decisions based on perceptions of harm.

The pattern is undeniable.

Fields abandon systematic thinking in the exact same order that women become a majority.

This should not be surprising. The research of psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen has long associated the male brain with a ‘systematising’ cognitive style, and the female brain with an ‘empathising’ style.

Here’s the problem: when an institution stops thinking systematically and starts thinking empathetically, it stops functioning as an institution.

It’s one thing for trust in media and academia to collapse, it’s another for courts and policing. If we continue on this course, it ends in the breakdown of civil order as we know it.

We need to face down the taboos about discussing this topic and change direction.

We have to put systems back at the centre of our institutions.

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Across the Anglosphere, public institutions are in crisis. Their legitimacy is collapsing with eerie synchronicity. For example, in the US, trust in public health authorities plummeted after COVID, dragging vaccine compliance down with it. Canadian universities lurch from one speech controversy to the next. Britain faces a particularly acute crisis. With left and right alike accusing police and courts of favouritism, or "two-tier justice", the legitimacy of the state has come into question.

The conventional explanations - social media echo chambers, political polarization, populist movements - fail to explain this synchronicity. Why would courts in Britain, universities in Canada, police in Australia, and newsrooms in America all lose legitimacy at the same time?

If the cause were local politics or digital disruption, we'd see variation in timing, severity and form. Instead, we observe something far more systematic: varied institutions failing in remarkably similar ways, at roughly the same time, across different political contexts and media landscapes.

Part of the explanation is the spread of a radical ideology that is causing Western institutions to abandon their traditional operating system. They're shifting from systematic, rules-based governance toward a more personal, harm-focused vision that puts subjective experience before the integrity of the system.

This ideology rejects the traditional foundations of institutional function: that rules must be applied universally, that processes must be transparent and consistent, and that legitimacy depends on the public perception of neutrality.

What enabled this ideological capture? The answer lies in demographic change: the mass entry of women into elite professions has shifted the cognitive centre of gravity of our governing class. Sex differences in cognitive styles, though modest at the individual level, have transformed institutional culture, making it receptive to this radical ideology.

The evidence for these propositions is clear. Fields have adopted people-focused philosophies in the same sequence that they feminised demographically. Humanities reached 50% female in 1970 and introduced the idea of "positionality" in the 1980s. Journalism approached gender parity in the 1990s and added "minimise harm" to its ethics codes in 1996. Psychology inverted from 68% male to 80% female, embraced "trauma-informed care" in the 2000s. Medicine became majority-female in 2025, having already pivoted to "equity-focused" curricula. Meanwhile, engineering and finance - still largely male - retain systematic frameworks that centre on the traditional values of "public welfare" and "fiduciary duty".

What raises this analysis above other “culture war” questions, is the huge stakes. There is clear evidence that if the process of institutional "de-systematisation" continues, it will result in social breakdown.

The peace and prosperity of the West rests upon its institutions. They generate scientific knowledge, deliver healthcare, sustain economic growth and maintain civil peace. Institutions are neutral referees by definition, applying uniform rules regardless of outcome. When they abandon procedural consistency for subjective harm assessments - when "who does this hurt?" overrides "what does the rules require?" - they cease to function as institutions. They become players in the game they were meant to officiate. Once the referee joins a team, the game collapses.

The UK offers a preview of where this leads. When courts face "two-tier justice" accusations and police enforcement is seen as openly selective, the country enters a legitimacy death spiral. This is the point where citizens no longer see any institution as operating by consistent principles. The public losing faith in academia and journalism is survivable; the public losing faith in courts, police and elections is not. Without these trusted arbiters, the civil order is destroyed.

But the UK's crisis only exemplifies a broader pattern. The mechanics are straightforward: a demographic shift spurred a cognitive shift, which allowed a particular ideology to capture institution after institution.

Since this ideology rejects the idea of uniform rules - the foundation of institutional function - its victory guarantees cascading failure. First the legitimacy of our institutions fails, then the social order they sustained collapses.

A powerful taboo prevents discussion of the link between the composition of the workforce and institutional function. But the stakes are too high to maintain a polite silence. It is impossible to slow a process that threatens order across the Anglosphere without acknowledging this reality.

How Referees Differ from Players

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health leaders demanded strict lockdowns, condemning protests against them as a public health danger. As the pandemic went on, messaging took on a harsh tone with critics branded as “denialists”.

Yet, when mass protests broke out over the death of George Floyd, that tone changed sharply. Over 1,000 public health professionals signed a letter arguing that "racism is a public health crisis", so warranting an exception to the pandemic rules.

Defenders will argue the judgment was contextual, but what mattered was public perception. Rules appeared to have been bent for political reasons. Polling showed trust in public health messaging falling sharply after 2020. More importantly, compliance with vaccination campaigns dropped around the world.

Similarly, before 2008, the doctrine of US banking regulators was clear: failing banks should be allowed to go to the wall. The doctrine of moral hazard demanded it. Bailouts only encourage bigger risks.

When Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, sending shockwaves through global markets, that principle held. Yet, when Goldman Sachs faced extinction in the subsequent panic, those rules changed. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, arranged a massive bailout. "Too big to fail" had trumped "moral hazard".

Again, defenders cited the context: preventing a global financial meltdown. But the public perception was simple: rules were bent for favoured groups. One bank died, another was saved by Government Sachs.

This decision again came with heavy costs. Rewarding those at the centre of the crisis put the legitimacy of Capitalism into question; and Occupy Wall Street was born. From the outside, it seemed that the referee was still playing for Goldman's team.

When the Referee Becomes a Player

While these events have significance at different ends of the political spectrum, they share a common feature: in both cases, impersonal rules appeared to be subordinated to personal, or group-oriented goals.

In each case, this resulted in an authority being demoted from arbiter to a parti pris faction. The new institutional goal looked partisan and public trust evaporated as the referee seemed to put on team colours.

These stories teach a fundamental lesson about institutions: they only work while they act - and are seen to act - according to impersonal, pre-announced rules. The moment an authority is seen to have been swayed by grievance or loyalty, its legitimacy fails.

When the referee takes a side: the rules are rendered meaningless. This observation is the key that unlocks the most pressing question of our time, why are a series of cascading legitimacy crises consuming institutions across the West?

The Everything Crisis

These two stories are a tiny part of a broader phenomenon in the West. Across the Anglosphere, many public institutions seem to be falling into similar crises. Academia, law enforcement, journalism, regulatory agencies, and the courts are all suffering crises of legitimacy in different countries. In each case, their authority is fading in the face of rising public scepticism.

The uniformity and reach of this phenomenon raises a pressing question: why is it happening to so many public institutions, across so many disparate countries, at the same time?

While it’s easy to point to political polarisation or social tensions as causes, these institutions have weathered far worse events in the past, including war, terrorism, mass rioting and the assassinations of leading political figures. If the legitimacy of the US court system survived a brutal civil war, the Trump presidency should be a minor challenge.

This essay offers a systematic explanation for these developments. It argues that these crises are driven by a fundamental shift in how institutions understand their role and mission. Our institutions are in process of adopting a model that does not work and can never be made to work.

Why Institutions Matter

The West's prosperity and social order rest upon foundations that are rarely examined: our institutions. These sophisticated social technologies explain why life here differs so markedly from the rest of world.

Each institution serves a distinct function: science generates knowledge, law resolves disputes, medicine protects health, markets create wealth, politics reconciles competing interests, journalism reveals truth and education transmits wisdom across the generations.

What transforms these bodies from mere collections of people into institutions is their systematic character: they operate through rules and procedures that transcend the individuals within them. A judge follows law regardless of personal feelings. A scientist follows method regardless of desired outcomes. A doctor treats patients identically whether they like them or not. An institution lives through its systems, not the people operating them.

Every functioning institution thus shares in three characteristics:

They are impersonal: The process remains constant regardless of who you are. Decisions turn on facts and criteria, not identity or status.

They are rule-bound: Actions follow public, pre-announced standards. Discretion is minimized: no carve-outs, exceptions or loopholes.

They are universal: Within their jurisdiction, the same rules apply to everyone.

The roots of these values run deep. In the case of the judicial system, for instance, the blindfold figure of Lady Justice has been the symbol of impartiality since the sixteenth century. But the origins of this principle lie in classical Athens. It prized isonomia - equality before the law, with jurors sworn to judge “without favour or enmity”.

The Legitimacy Crisis

If institutions underpin quality of life in the West, polling and media coverage reveal a consistent pattern of collapsing trust in them across the Anglosphere. This is particularly true in the UK, where the phenomenon seems near universal:

Law: Courts face mounting accusations of political capture. US Supreme Court decisions now split predictably along partisan lines. UK judges confront "two-tier justice" allegations, with YouGov showing those with "little/no confidence" in the judicial system outnumbering those with high confidence. When the UK Sentencing Council recently moved to drive sentencing by ethnicity, 72% of the population opposed the initiativke.

Law Enforcement: British policing faces a profound legitimacy crisis. Public trust is collapsing, with enforcement perceived as increasingly selective. The left protests against surging terrorism arrests of its activists; the right points to selective enforcement of speech codes. Leading MPs allege that the UK is experiencing "anarcho-tyranny", with the state ceasing to police theft and violent crime, and preferring to focus on non-violent speech infractions.

Medicine: Public health authorities squandered decades of credibility-building during the Covid pandemic. Medical advice is now perceived as “nudged” and politicised rather than evidence-based. Shifting positions on the effectiveness of masks, false information on the efficacy of the COVID vaccine in preventing transmission, on natural vs. artificial immunity and inconsistent statements on the safety of mass protests have eroded public faith. This has had real world consequences, causing vaccine compliance to fall. The pendulum swing to RFK Jr.'s vaccine scepticism looks to many on the left like equal and opposite politicisation.

Politics: The UK's two major parties - derided by their critics as the "Uniparty" - now poll only 36% of the vote combined. Only 11% of Britons trust politicians to tell the truth, a figure that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Citizens are also losing faith in the idea that voting changes government policy. Critics of mass migration point out that winning parties have promised to limit it at every election, only for the numbers to hit ever greater highs.

Journalism: The reputation of the profession plumbs ever deeper lows. It is widely believed to have swapped objective reporting for political activism. In the US, salient failures include the lab-leak theory censorship, collusion in the Hunter Biden laptop suppression, with later U-turns in both cases, biased reporting during the BLM protests, and the failure to raise red flags over Biden’s mental decline. Fox News's promotion of bizarre election fraud claims have also resulted in massive legal settlements. It’s not surprising that Reuters Institute data show trust in journalism collapsing to historic lows across partisan lines.

Academia: Academia has a growing reputation for prioritising ideology and feelings over knowledge, truth and objective standards. That Trump - after campaigning on free speech absolutism - has used state power to suppress campus criticism of Israel confirms that these phenomena transcend party lines. The status of academia has dropped accordingly, with the proportion of Americans saying college education is “very important” falling from 75% in 2010 to 35% today.

These legitimacy crises share a striking feature: they're happening simultaneously across different institutions, varied countries, dissimilar political systems and with different ideologies in power. This synchronicity demands explanation beyond local politics or cultural quirks. It is clear that something profound is occurring, and on a global scale, but what is it?

Ruling Out a Common Explanation

We can rule out the most popular explanation for the outbreak of legitimacy crises in the Anglosphere: the idea that digital disruption has undermined the authority of our elites.

The thesis: The rise of social media has shattered the elite’s monopoly on narrative. Once, our institutions were once able to gatekeep information, but digital platforms now let anyone broadcast counter-narrative unchecked. This has caused the old knowledge hierarchies to collapse, taking expert authority with them.

There was a time when highly educated elites managed knowledge, these days their role has been usurped by the likes of Joe Rogan, Alex Jones and the armies of influencers.

Why this explanation fails: This theory portrays a virtuous and conservative establishment that has been betrayed by an irrational public, seduced by radical ideas. Yet the evidence shows just the opposite: elites have abandoned traditional principles that the public continues to defend.

Consider the UK Sentencing Council’s recent attempt to differentiate sentencing by race. This wasn’t a response to popular demand, it was a top-down rejection of isonomia, an ideal dating back to classical Athens. When Columbia Journalism School declared objectivity obsolete, it was a revolt by journalists, not the public. Academia's embrace of "multiple ways of knowing" over science came from its own faculty, not from the streets.

This explanation turns the facts upside down. It is the elites who have abandoned traditional norms, not the public

Two Models of Institutional Purpose

We’ve seen that many institutions in the Anglosphere are facing legitimacy crises of some kind, and we have discounted the most commonly sited explanation for these developments. Before building our own explanation, we need to look at two competing philosophies currently battling for control of our institutions.

Inside every bureaucracy, NGO, university, professional body, and newsroom, there are two radically different models vying for dominance. Both acknowledge human fallibility, but the solutions they recommend could not be more different:

The Traditional Liberal View (System-First): This philosophy has been the bedrock of Western institutions for centuries, seeking to manage human fallibility through impartial systems. Accepting that human beings are inherently biased, it argues that these biases can be contained through impersonal mechanisms. Its tools are blind rules, pre-announced, universal standards, systematic checks and balances, audits, and replication of results. The goal is to achieve procedural fairness and objectivity, and ensure that an institution functions as a neutral referee.

When bias is detected, its seeks to identify the failure that allowed it to manifest, eliminate it and restore the system to a state of impartiality. Law must be blind to the identities of accused and accuser. Science should be objective and its findings replicable. Medicine must be evidence-based and its treatments allocated according to clinical need. Journalism should be factual and disinterested. The integrity of these processes is paramount because fair procedures, applied consistently to all, yield the best outcomes for society.

The Critical View (People-First): This roots of this philosophy lie in the Marxist traditions of critical theory. It sees claims of neutrality and objectivity as fictions that mask and perpetuate existing power structures. Every institution is an arena for struggle between different identity groups, defined by characteristics such as race, gender, sexuality and class.

As true neutrality impossible, the Critical View argues that institutions should not even try it. Instead, they should correct systemic inequity by favouring disadvantaged identity groups. The central question shifts from “Is this process fair and objective?” to “Who does this harm?” and then, “Whose power does this reinforce?” The focus moves from the integrity of the system to the subjective experience of its participants.

But here’s the problem: in practice, the Critical View can never function as an operating doctrine for our institutions.

To understand why, imagine a referee who, after seeing statistics on home-team bias, publicly announces: "Objectivity is a fiction. I now see that I'm just another player on the field”. In such an event, the whistle would becomes meaningless and discipline on the field would collapse. Referee neutrality is, at the very least, a necessary fiction if the game is to proceed.

The lesson: institutions require operators who publicly assert their belief in uniform rules. Without this, the institution dies. Whatever the Critical View’s virtues as an academic analysis, as an operating system, it is lethal. This renders it inherently oppositional and of value only to critics and commentators. As an organisational ethos, it destroys from within.

If adopted, institutional decisions begin to look arbitrary, biased and fraud-prone to outsiders. Trust evaporates. Compliance collapses. The bitter observation that "nothing works anymore" first becomes commonplace, then universal.

The bitter lesson: when institutions abandon systems for feelings, they don't become more humane; they cease to function, leaving everyone worse off.

To summarise: the West's cascading legitimacy crises stem from the Critical View's conquest of our institutions. By putting subjective harm over objective rules, by raising perceptions over procedures, this ideology makes their functioning impossible. A referee who questions the validity of the rules cannot arbitrate.

Simon Baron-Cohen: Systematising vs. Empathising Styles

Before we start to lay out our explanation from end to end, there is still a piece of the jigsaw missing. This is the work of the psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen, in distinguishing the two fundamental human cognitive styles.

Systematising Style: This style is defined by the drive to analyse and understand systems by identifying their rules. Whether examining a machine, legal code, or market, the systematising mind seeks patterns, consistency, and predictable application of principles. It is impersonal and logic-driven. While not exclusive to men, this style is statistically more common among them (see the appendix Tempering the Argument for the statistical detail).

Empathising Style: This style is defined by a drive to identify emotions and respond appropriately. It excels at reading interpersonal dynamics, sensing distress, and navigating social hierarchies. The empathising mind is relational and people-focused. It evaluates institutions using perceptions of harm and benefit.

Both of these perspectives are essential: a functioning society needs systematic justice tempered by human compassion. Problems arise when either style becomes too dominant and is used in an inappopriate context.

Baron-Cohen’s styles map precisely onto our competing institutional philosophies.

The System-First view aligns with systematising style: prioritise process integrity, apply neutral rules, maintain consistent standards.

The People-First view aligns with empathising style: evaluate by perceived harm, adjust rules for vulnerable groups, ask “who does this hurt?”

This helps explain why the entry of women into the workforce made our institutions receptive to the Critical View. Women, on average, score higher on empathising and lower on systematising. These differences are modest at the average. Around a third of women are more systematising than the average male.

But they are significant at the tails, where institutional norms are set and decisions are often made. Almost all the most systematising people are male; and vice-versa for people-orientation.

The claim is that - as women entered elite professions en masse from the 1970s onward - they shifted the cognitive centre of gravity of the governing class. This acted as a powerful accelerant for the Critical View’s growth as an operating philosophy for our institutions. The philosophy’s core tenets (prioritising subjective harm, centring lived experience, rejecting neutrality as “fake”) resonated powerfully with the newly dominant cognitive style.

How the Critical View Captured Our Institutions

The Critical View was born in 1960s as a person-orientated version of Marxism. Traditional Marxism had been hyper-systematised. It presented a system of scientific socialism that supposedly explained everything, from the existing social conditions to past and future history.

But Marxism underwent a cultural turn in the 1960s that put the “science” in the background, moving the more personal oppressor/oppressed framework to the centre-ground. This new Marxism orbited the power relations of the social groups it demarcated as good or bad.

During the 1970s, radical feminists like Catherine MacKinnon adapted this framework to their cause, casting men as oppressors (ex-bourgeoisie) and women as oppressed (the pseudo proletariat).

Feminism and the new Marxism had something classical liberalism lacked: a philosophical critique of systematisation. This questioned whether neutral rules, objective knowledge, and procedural fairness were possible. According to this framework, the irresistible pull of economic and cultural power distorted any system, like mass distorting spacetime.

But how did this oppositional ideology - explicitly hostile to institutional neutrality - ever gain entry to institutions in the first place?

The answer lies in the culture of 1970s and 80s academia. Universities were still male-dominated, some had only recently admitted women. Male academics were largely left-liberals who saw feminists as allies against conservative power. They operated under a “no enemies on the left” principle, granting institutional space to feminist scholarship as part of an imagined “progressive coalition”.

Critically, they failed to recognize that MacKinnon-style feminism wasn’t just adding women’s concerns to the liberal project - it rejected the entire Enlightenment framework. By the time these fundamental incompatibilities became obvious, it was too late. The ideology had established self-perpetuating beachheads in humanities departments, created academic programs that trained new cohorts, and built institutional power through emerging HR and compliance functions.

This explains both the timing and the transmission vector. The ideology couldn’t have spread if male gatekeepers had recognized its anti-systematic nature. But liberal academic culture in the 1970s-80s valued ideological pluralism and failed to recognize that this was a revolutionary challenge rather than a reform to the liberal worldview.

Demographic Change Drives the Adoption of the Critical View

If this analysis is correct, it raises another pressing question: why did the Critical View spread out from academia through elite culture, from the 1980s onwards?

Proving direct causation for a cultural shift of this magnitude is difficult. Disentangling it from correlation is tough without controlled experiments. But, within this context, the evidence that the mass entry of women into the workforce accelerated the spread of the Critical View is as strong as it can be.

The Critical View was born in academia and might have remained a fringe ideology. However, its core tenets - prioritising subjective harm and personal experience - resonated powerfully with a cognitive style spreading through our organisations. Our thesis is that the changing demographics of elite institutions created a cultural environment in which the Critical View could flourish and eventually gain dominance.

The De-Legitimisation Mechanism

We now turn to outlining the end to end process that generates crises of institutional legitimacy. This de-legitimisation mechanism has three steps:

Permeation → Reorientation → Delegitimisation.

1) Permeation
People-facing domains - journalism, social work/psychology, HR, education, advocacy - naturally attract empathising temperaments; rising female participation reinforces the style. Over time, “system” domains (policing, the military, tech, regulation, parts of law) are also reframed through a people/harm lens via hiring, training and policy revisions.

What changes: vocabulary (harm, safety, trauma, impact) displaces process language (standards, rules, precedent); HR, Compliance and Comms functions gain internal clout; discretionary “case-by-case” handling expands.

2) Reorientation
Missions subtly shift from process integrity to harm minimisation: from truth-seeking to affirmation, rules to compassion, fairness to equalised outcomes. Personal experience becomes an evidentiary trump card and exceptions to rules begin to proliferate.

What changes: goals move from applying the same rule to reducing disparity of outcome/avoiding harm complaints; hard standards are softened; discretion substitutes for general criteria. In the absence of internal arbiters and agreed norms, the atmosphere within the institution sours and faction fighting grows. The traditional organisational values become stigmatised as “old fashioned”.

3) De-Legitimisation
As universals weaken, outcomes grow inconsistent and politicised. Outsiders infer favouritism and arbitrariness; insiders learn that appeals to maintain system integrity fall flat. Compliance drops and trust erodes. Bad actors find loopholes to exploit the system, diverting resources from their true object. The institution becomes increasingly de-systematised: values are personalised, and the core rationale - calling the game by the rules - is lost.

What changes: widening variance in the outcomes of similar cases; reasoning by examples rather than rules; explicit identity carve-outs; ballooning fraud and misallocation of resources; and sharply declining trust metrics. Working conditions grow toxic as factionalism goes unrestrained by internal rules.

The end point is the “nothing works” society, where every process grinds to a halt. Every attempt to achieve anything of value seems to end in failure.

Evidence that the Entry of Women Accelerated the Spread of the Critical View

The most persuasive evidence for our thesis lies in the sequence in which different fields adopted the personal frame. This closely tracks the order in which women became a majority of the workforce: from the early-moving domains of HR and the humanities to the later-adopting fields of finance and engineering.

The evidence for demographic change driving institutional transformation rests on three empirical pillars:

1. The Baseline: Historically Female Fields Were Always People-First

Professions that were female-dominated before 1970 provide our control group. Their foundational principles have always been people-centred, not systematic.

For example, US K-12 education has been majority-female since the 1800s. Its pedagogy has always been "child-centred" - tailoring education to individual needs, interests, and developmental stages. Nursing, female-dominated since its professionalization, adopted its ethical code in 1950 with the principle that the nurse's "primary commitment is to the patient". Social work, another historically female field, pioneered "person-first language" in the 1980s.

These fields didn't change - they were always this way. This baseline proves the principle: empathizing-dominant workforces create people-first institutions.

2. Waves of Transformation: Each Field Changed After It Feminised

As male-dominated professions feminized, they underwent a philosophical transformation in the same sequence:.

First Wave (1970s-1990s): Humanities reached 50% female master's recipients in 1970. Within a decade, "positionality" challenged objectivity and identity-based "studies" programs proliferated. Corporate HR transformed from administrative "Personnel" (rules and contracts) to "Human Resources" (employee experience and belonging), later evolving from compliance-based Affirmative Action to the social justice mission of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Second Wave (1990s-2010s): Journalism approached gender parity in the early 1990s. In 1996 - just on cue - the Society of Professional Journalists added "Minimise Harm" to its ethics code for the first time, including directives to "show compassion" and acknowledge that reporting "may cause harm". Psychology inverted from 68% male (1968) to 80% female (2023), shifting from diagnosis to "trauma-informed care"—from asking "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" Psychologists are show increasing reluctance to diagnose disorders e.g. certain personality disorders, for potentially imposing arbitrary social norms.

Third Wave (2000s-Present): Medicine crossed the threshold last. The UK hit majority-female in February 2025; the US reached parity in medical schools around 2017-2019. Both immediately overhauled curricula to emphasize "health equity" and "social determinants" over clinical objectivity.

The pattern is stable: 5-20 years after the demographic shift, a philosophical transformation follows. This isn't evidence of correlation, it's evidence of a generational mechanism. As feminised cohorts rise to leadership, the change the organisation’s worldview.

3. The Proof by Negation: Unchanged Fields Remain Systematic

Compelling evidence also flows from the fields that haven't changed. Engineering and finance are holdouts that remain demographically male-dominated, especially in leadership roles. As out thesis predicts, their operating philosophies have also remained remarkably stable and "system-first":

In the US, National Society of Professional Engineers’ ethical code still has as its first and highest duty to "Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public". The language throughout remains systematic and duty-focused with no significant shifts toward harm-centred or identity-based frameworks.

The ethical core of the CFA Institute Code is "fiduciary duty" and the "integrity and viability of the global capital markets" – rules not feelings or wellbeing.

Thus, no demographic shift, no philosophical shift. The exceptions prove the rule.

An Irresistible Force

No field that has feminised has escaped transformation. None. The waves arrived in sequence - humanities, then corporate functions, then mainstream professions, now core state institutions. Engineering and finance stand alone. For now. When their demographics shift - and current graduation rates suggest they will – we should expect the same outcome.

This isn't culture war speculation but documented fact. The mechanism operates across every field analysed: demographic change drives cognitive change, which enables institutional transformation. The pattern is so consistent it almost functions like a social law.

The implications are stark. As the last systematic institutions feminise, they too will abandon rule-based operation for harm-based adjudication. When this transformation reaches the final bastions - courts, police, hard science, the electoral system - the foundations of civil order will collapse.

For insight into how a feminised legal system might operate, consider this:

Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch. Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty-second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.

Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating. You want to breathe; you have to breathe. But you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe.

That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight. For two to four minutes, Boyd will remain conscious while the State of Alabama kills him in this way. When the gas starts flowing, he will immediately convulse. He will gasp for air.

This is not crime fiction - it is a legal statement by US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. It is dramatic, emotive, and harm-centered. It does not attempt to address the law. The facts are also incorrect: nitrogen does not cause panic or convulsion.

Whatever role Sotomayor plays here, it is not that of a Supreme Court justice. The legal system functions by reference to rules, not emotional appeals. When jurisprudence degenerates into competing emotional narratives, it can no longer deliver the social function for which it was designed.

A society without a functioning legal system returns to the era before law - a time of tribal justice, when power, not principle, settled disputes. Civilisation itself ceases to function.

How De-Systematisation Transforms Politics

This shift from systematic to empathetic thinking isn't confined to professional codes - it's also reshaping policy debates across the Anglosphere. Policy debates often divide along cognitive lines.

Take the UK's Online Safety Act. The most effective arguments for the act were personal and empathetic: protect vulnerable children from harmful content. Critics raised systematic objections: the restrictions were technically futile (children can use free VPNs), the compliance burden would drive innovative services from the UK, and the identity verification requirements created massive security vulnerabilities. Citizens are forced to give sensitive identity documents to sketchy web services that are likely to be hacked.

Yet voicing these systematic concerns risked being branded as indifferent to child safety - a reputation-destroying accusation that silences rational analysis.

This pattern repeats everywhere. The strongest arguments for free speech are systematic: truth emerges through competitive discourse, not censorship. A system of open debate provides better error-correction than any official arbiter of truth. Similarly, markets work because they aggregate millions of decisions into price signals no planner could calculate. The system functions precisely because it's impersonal: it doesn't care who you are, only whether you offer value. It works without human regulators setting prices or planners directing production.

But the dominant arguments against free speech and markets are empathetic. They highlight victims: the insulted minority, the struggling worker, the marginalised group. The systematic benefits - knowledge discovery, efficient coordination, innovation - vanish from consideration. The question shifts from "How do we optimise the system?" to "Who gets hurt?". Hard cases and sad stories displace abstract principles.

This cognitive rebalancing has major social and economic consequences. As empathetic thinking has gained institutional dominance, the UK simultaneously experienced:

- Escalating speech restrictions (the "harm" principle expands infinitely)

- Renewed enthusiasm for price controls, regulation and market intervention

- Decades of economic stagnation (market allocation beats state intervention)

- Rolling sequence of legitimacy crises, now putting the legitimacy of the state in question (highlighted at the beginning of this essay)

The pattern is clear: societies that replace systematic thinking with empathy get neither efficiency nor compassion, but dysfunction and disorder. When institutions establish protection from hurt as their ultimate value, they set off down a path towards economic sclerosis and social discord that undermines prosperity and freedom from the foundations up.

This is practical politics, not abstract philosophy: the de-systematisation of our institutions is becoming the primary driver of political and economic outcomes across the West.

Most policy debates now split the same way: systematic thinkers point to mechanisms and outcomes; empathetic thinkers point to victims and feelings. As our institutions increasingly privilege the latter, they cease to solve the problems they were created to address.

The Solution: Restoring Institutional Logic

Three obstacles make reform exceptionally difficult:

Self-perpetuation: Those operating de-systematised institutions lack the cognitive framework to diagnose the problem. They cannot turn away from what they see as progress.

Traditional fixes fail: More training or oversight won’t restore belief in neutrality. You cannot regulate someone into abandoning their worldview.

Time is running out: As younger cohorts soaked in the Critical View ascend to leadership, the window for reform narrows. When empathetic thinking fully captures the judiciary, the rule of law will end.

The path back will not be easy. We will need to reassert systematisation as a governing logic, keep empathy as a brake, and refuse to admit ideologies that reject neutrality into our institutions.

An effective fix demands the following elements:

First, rebuild the public understanding of why neutral institutions matter. The case must be made relentlessly: a flawed but impartial referee is better than no referee at all. Courts that bend rules for sympathy become tools of power. Police who enforce selectively turn into party militias. Referees who doubt the rules end the game.

Second, revise institutional codes to prioritize process over outcomes. Activists have thoroughly compromised professional ethics codes, hiring criteria, training manuals and performance standards. Strip the personal focus out. Replace “minimise harm” with “apply rules consistently”. Substitute “equal treatment” for “equity”. Replace “lived experience” with “verified evidence”.

Third, restore systematic thinking in professional training. Law schools must teach procedural justice before social justice. Medical schools must prioritise clinical evidence over social theory. Journalism programs must resurrect objectivity as an ideal, even if imperfectly achieved.

Fourth, create new oversight focused on procedural consistency. Establish review boards that audit decisions for bias, not against groups, but against consistent rule application. Track whether similar cases receive similar treatment regardless of the identities involved.

Finally, address the pipeline. Just as engineering requires engineers, systematic institutions require systematisers. This doesn’t mean entirely excluding empathetic thinkers, but institutions can only be led by those who believe in systematic processes. Recruitment, training, and promotion must explicitly value systematic thinking alongside other skills.

The stakes here could hardly be higher. Legitimacy crises in academia or journalism are one thing, legitimacy crises in the courts and policing are quite another. They put the survival of the state in question. The UK is already approaching that precipice. The rest of the Anglosphere should heed the warning.

Re-systematising is difficult, but institutional reform has been successfully effected before and can be effected again. The time to start is now. The first step toward reform is not to invent new systems, but for institutional leaders to relearn how to defend the ones we have. They must be willing to defend impersonal rules, even when it is uncomfortable, and to make the case that a flawed but impartial referee is ultimately better for everyone than none at all.

After this piece went live, Helen Andrews published an article on the Feminisation Thesis in Compact. This provoked attacks on the thesis from Richard Hanania, David French, Cathy Young and Megan McArdle.

To read a full rebuttal of their arguments, please click here

Postscript

What this Essay Does Not Say

The claims in this piece will surely enrage some people. But here is a list of claims that are not being made:

- The mass entry of women into the workforce destroyed Western civilization. Women’s entry into the workforce was inevitable and brough advantages. For instance, it was a key driver of economic growth in the 80s and 90s.

- Male-dominated organisations were perfect before the entry of women. There are, in fact, parallel issues with male-dominated organisations, but they do not impact legitimacy and so are outside the scope of this essay.

- Women must now be excluded from jobs in public institutions. This makes no sense. Around one third of women are more system-orientated than the average man. Ditto, around one third of men are more person-orientated than the average woman.

- The Critical View must be rooted out of academia. The Critical View is inherently oppositional, this makes it entirely unsuited for any role in our institutions. But that does not mean that it is never a useful tool for outsider critics and commentators.

A better way of looking at the problem is this: our institutions have had centuries to develop norms that reckon with male dysfunction e.g., corruption, cronyism, unchecked aggression and overt bias, but these now operate as a kind of Maginot Line, facing off to an invisible foe. With women dominating many of out institutions, we rapidly need to develop new norms to deal with distinctive patterns of female dysfunction.

Tempering the Argument

This argument rests on statistical distributions, not individual capacities. When institutions shift from systematic to empathetic operation as they feminise, we see population-level effects where small mean differences create large institutional changes.

Sex differences in cognitive styles are two overlapping normal curves: men average higher on systemizing, women on empathizing, but the overlap is substantial. With a mean gap of roughly half a standard deviation:

c.31% of women score above the average man on systematising.

c.31% of men score above the average woman on empathising.

However, institutions draw leadership from the tails of these distributions. Small mean differences produce large disparities at the extremes: men are roughly 3× more likely to be in the top 5% of systemisers, 4× in the top 1%. These tail effects reshape institutional culture as different cognitive styles accumulate in decision-making positions.

It’s wrong to equate cognitive style with sex. Despite his hypermasculine persona, Donald Trump exemplifies person-centred leadership. He is driven by personal loyalties, grievances, and relationships rather than systematic rules. Conversely, Margaret Thatcher embodied systematic thinking, pursuing market logic despite the human costs. She earned her nickname of the "Iron Lady" precisely for her refusal to bend rules for sob stories.

Both cognitive styles are essential. Empathy prevents systems from becoming inhuman machines grinding towards abstract goals ungrounded in human realities. But empathy should constrain systems, not replace them. When personal validation displaces rules, when narrative displaces evidence, when feelings displace facts, institutions stop functioning. The brake cannot ever become the engine.

This isn't gender determinism. Many women excel at systematic thinking; many men at empathetic reasoning. The argument concerns what happens when aggregate cognitive balance shifts at the institutional level. When either style dominates completely, institutions fail.

The evidence demonstrates that institutional function requires cognitive balance. The challenge isn't eliminating either style but maintaining the equilibrium necessary for institutions to serve their purpose: applying consistent rules while staying responsive to human needs. As the balance tips toward empathy, we're discovering - repeatedly, across every institution - that their legitimacy does not survive the transformation.

Male Dysfunction and the Maginot Line Problem

This essay could be misread as prosecuting women and excusing men. That would be a misunderstanding. Male-dominated institutions have their own distinctive pathologies - ones that we’ve spent centuries learning to constrain.

Traditional institutional safeguards were designed to combat specifically male forms of dysfunction: corruption, cronyism, nepotism, aggressive risk-taking, and the consolidation of power through clannish networks.

These are failures of rule-breaking. A corrupt official knows the rules but violates them for personal gain, nonetheless. An aggressive executive knows the risk models and ignores them to maximise his returns. A nepotistic hiring manager knows the merit criteria and circumvents them for his allies.

We have built elaborate systems, over centuries, to counter these tendencies: anticorruption laws, audits, conflicts-of-interest rules, independent oversight bodies, Chinese walls between functions, and formal merit-based hiring procedures. These safeguards generally work - not perfectly, but well enough that outright corruption and cronyism are low compared to most of human history.

But here’s the problem: these safeguards now operate like a Maginot Line, fortified against one type of attack while a different threat emerges from an unanticipated direction.

Female-dominated institutions display completely different failure modes. The dysfunction isn’t rule-breaking but rule-eroding. It manifests not through aggressive power-grabbing but through consensus-driven drift.

Rather than corrupt officials taking bribes, we see well-intentioned professionals expanding “harm” criteria until rules lose any substance. Rather than cronyism, we see therapeutic language weakening institutional boundaries. Rather than reckless risk-taking, we see growing paralysis as instiutions turn inwards and lose sight of their original mission.

These patterns don’t trigger traditional safeguards because they don’t look like traditional wrongdoing. An anticorruption audit won’t flag a sentencing council that sincerely equates its fringe political outlook with justice. Conflicts-of-interest rules won’t stop journalists who genuinely believe in suppressing important stories for the greater good. Merit-based hiring procedures won’t prevent the redefining competence as “emotional intelligence” rather than systematic delivery of an instititional mission.

The distinction matters enormously for institutional legitimacy. When a male-dominated institution fails through corruption, the response is straightforward: identify the bad actors, prosecute them, strengthen the safeguards. The rules are legitimate; we just need to enforce them better.

But when institutions fail through de-systematization, prosecution doesn’t help. Nobody broke any rules. The problem is the rules, or rather, their dissolution. You can’t restore legitimacy by punishing individuals when the entire institution has abandoned the principles that made it legitimate in the first place.

This is why the current crisis is so dangerous. Our centuries of institutional development have equipped us to handle corruption, aggression, and power-grabbing. We have no comparable defenses against mission drift, consensus-driven rule-erosion, and the replacement of systematic judgment with empathetic assessment.

Our institutions currently face a different threat than the one they were designed to resist. If we want institutions that function, we need to develop new norms that address patterns of dysfunction we haven’t yet learned to constrain, while maintaining the old safeguards.