That in itself had people shocked. Helen theorizes that it actually came from something way simpler… the quiet but steady feminization of America's most powerful institutions.

Intrigued? Yes, so were we….

Andrews calls this cultural shift "The Great Feminization," and her theory flips a lot of earlier assumptions on their head. Helen pinpoints this shift back to the moment Larry Summers was pushed out of Harvard back in 2005 for suggesting that men and women might have different skills in science. Helen believes that was the spark that ignited the entire woke era… when emotional outrage replaced rational debate and these elite institutions began enforcing left-wing ideology through feelings instead of facts.

Andrews backs up her argument with data that shows how back in the 2010s, women became the majority in nearly every elite profession. From law and medicine to media and academia, the ladies began running the show. Helen says once that shift happened, the entire vibe changed: empathy over logic, safety over risk, and comfort over competition.

Compact Mag:

In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym "J. Stone," argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire "woke" era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.

The basic facts of the Summers case were familiar to me. On January 14, 2005, at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce," Larry Summers gave a talk that was supposed to be off the record. In it, he said that female underrepresentation in hard sciences was partly due to "different availability of aptitude at the high end" as well as taste differences between men and women "not attributable to socialization." Some female professors in attendance were offended and sent his remarks to a reporter, in defiance of the off-the-record rule. The ensuing scandal led to a no-confidence vote by the Harvard faculty and, eventually, Summers's resignation.