Something has changed in our society’s institutions. Most men sense it even if they can’t name it. The schools, workplaces, courts and government departments feel more managed and anxious — less interested in the truth than in making sure nobody feels bad along the way.

It’s not just me saying this. Journalist and writer Helen Andrews has named what’s happening. Her viral essay ‘The Great Feminisation’ — recently published in Compact — argues that what’s often shrugged off as ‘wokeness’ is actually a demographic phenomenon.

She argues that as women have moved into majority positions across law, journalism, academia and medicine, those institutions now run on female group norms: consensus over competition, emotional appeals over logic, covert social pressure over open conflict.

To be abundantly clear, Andrews is not arguing that women are inferior. She’s saying that female group norms — when they’re applied wholesale to an institution that’s designed for a completely different purpose — change that institution beyond recognition.

When Norms Redesign Institutions

The data she presents is striking.

Law schools in the US became majority female in 2016, and medical schools in 2019. The New York Times became majority female in 2018. And the pattern Andrews identifies is that feminisation doesn’t stop at 50-50 — it accelerates past the halfway point until masculine norms become unwelcome and masculine men leave. Psychology was once a majority-male field, for example, while today, women receive 75 percent of psychology doctorates.

An important point Andrews adds is this: the feminisation of institutions was not some kind of organic result where women simply outcompeted men. It was engineered — through anti-discrimination law, HR systems, and even litigation that made masculine workplace culture legally dangerous.

Remove the thumb from the scale, she argues, and much of this ‘Great Feminisation’ reverses within a generation.

What Andrews has observed is useful to know, but it doesn’t change what’s true right now: the institutions your kids are growing up in have been redesigned. In today’s world, there are far fewer places that will tolerate your son’s natural tendencies — his directness, his appetite for competition, his instinct to establish hierarchy and then reconcile after conflict.

In fact, there are also far fewer places dedicated to your daughter’s long-term flourishing. Why? Because institutions that elevate feelings over facts and consensus over truth produce fragile women, not strong, capable ones.

The upshot of these developments is that the work of formation has shifted. It used to be that schools, sporting clubs, libraries and community groups could be trusted to reinforce the habits we parents were trying to build at home — habits like speak plainly, handle conflict honestly, pursue truth even when it’s uncomfortable, earn respect through competence, not by managing feelings.

Many institutions aren’t doing that anymore. In fact, some are actively working against it.

The Home as Counterweight

I think about this when I’m raising my own kids. The habits they’re building now — how they handle conflict, whether they tell the truth, if they take responsibility for their mistakes and seek to make things right — will shape them for life. These are the very building blocks of their character. And if I’m not proactive in how I shape them at home, the institutions I once relied on are likely to take my kids in a completely different direction, and one I don’t approve of.

The culture is already forming your children — through screens, peer dynamics, and institutions staffed by people who have particular assumptions about what men and women are, and what they should become. That formation isn’t neutral — but it is everywhere.

But there is one institution that hasn’t been redesigned by legal pressures or demographic shifts: your home. In partnership with your wife, you’re the leader. You get to set its culture, model its habits and shape what your children see as normal.

You get to set the example for direct speech, taking responsibility, competing in healthy ways, and reconciling well. Your home is where your son can learn that his instincts aren’t pathological. It’s where your daughter can learn what a trustworthy man looks like — which, research shows, is the single greatest predictor of her future relationships and wellbeing.

Your home doesn’t have to be a fortress. What it needs to be is a counterweight, where children are raised to embrace hard things, and to handle the world as it actually is.

I’m afraid the institutions won’t do that — not anymore.

That important work belongs to you and me.

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Image courtesy of Unsplash.