When the Workplace Changes

Women have transformed the professions. But what does the evidence actually tell us about gender and institutional culture?

Something historically remarkable has happened to professional life.

For much of modern history, women entering medicine, law, academia, journalism or corporate management entered institutions created and led overwhelmingly by men.

The partners were usually men.

The professors were usually men.

The physicians were usually men.

The judges were usually men.

The rules—written and unwritten—had developed largely without women participating in their creation.

Women entering these professions therefore had little choice but to adapt.

Today, that world is disappearing.

Women are not merely entering many professions.

In some, they are becoming the majority.

That raises an interesting question:

When the people inside institutions change, do the institutions themselves change too?

The answer deserves careful investigation.

Not because women necessarily behave one way and men another.

And certainly not because one sex is inherently better suited to professional life.

Rather, because institutions are human creations. They are shaped by the people inside them—and those institutions, in turn, shape the people who join them.

A provocative argument starts a larger conversation

In October 2025, writer Helen Andrews addressed this transformation in an essay titled The Great Feminization, published in Compact.

Andrews argues that increasing female representation has changed the culture of several important Western institutions.

She associates this transformation with greater emphasis on empathy, interpersonal harmony and safety, and less emphasis on competition, risk-taking and adversarial disagreement.

Her essay goes considerably further, suggesting that these changes may sometimes weaken institutions whose traditional functions require competition, impartial rules or robust disagreement.

These are provocative claims.

They are also much broader than the available evidence can establish.

That distinction is important.

Andrews's essay provides an interesting hypothesis.

It does not provide the final answer.

So what happens when we compare that hypothesis with what researchers have actually learned about women, men and organizations?

The demographic transformation is real

On the underlying demographic change, there is little disagreement.

Consider medicine.

Women have constituted the majority of applicants, matriculants and total enrollment in U.S. medical schools for seven consecutive years.

During the 2025–26 academic year, women represented 57.2% of applicants and 55% of both matriculants and total enrollment at MD-granting medical schools.

Source: Association of American Medical Colleges
https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/medical-school-enrollment-reaches-100000-students-first-time

Law is moving in a similar direction.

According to the American Bar Association, women represented 56.2% of American law students in 2024.

Women are also now the majority among federal government lawyers and law-firm associates.

But there is an interesting qualification.

Women remain considerably less represented at the highest levels of the profession. In 2023, for example, women accounted for only about 28% of law-firm partners.

Source: American Bar Association
https://www.americanbar.org/news/profile-legal-profession/

So we are living through a genuine historical transition.

The interesting question isn't whether it is happening.

It is what happens next.

Are women and men actually different at work?

This is where discussions about gender can become unnecessarily polarized.

One position assumes there are essentially no meaningful average behavioural differences between women and men.

Another treats familiar stereotypes about men and women as though they were universal biological facts.

Neither adequately describes the research.

Psychologists and economists have identified average differences between women and men in some behaviours.

But those differences vary considerably depending upon what is being measured, how it is measured and the environment in which people are operating.

Most importantly:

An average difference between two groups tells us surprisingly little about any particular person.

There are highly competitive women and highly cooperative men.

Risk-taking women and cautious men.

Emotionally perceptive men and emotionally reserved women.

Human beings overlap enormously.

That distinction is essential whenever research about populations becomes a conversation about individuals.

What about empathy?

One characteristic frequently associated with women is empathy.

There is some evidence supporting an average difference—but the science is much more complicated than the stereotype.

Women commonly score higher than men on self-reported measures of empathy.

Yet an interesting 2023 study using both questionnaires and EEG measurements found something revealing.

Women rated themselves as more empathetic on questionnaires.

But researchers found no significant sex difference in the neural responses they measured when participants observed other people's pain.

Even more intriguingly, when researchers experimentally altered expectations about male and female empathy, the questionnaire difference disappeared.

Source: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36807483/

That does not prove that women and men experience empathy identically.

It tells us something more interesting.

Biology may matter.

Socialization may matter.

And cultural expectations about how women and men should behave may matter too.

Researchers are still disentangling them.

What about competition?

Here there is stronger evidence of an average difference.

A major 2022 meta-analysis examined 110 studies and 409 effect sizes involving people's willingness to enter competitive tournaments.

Across those studies, men selected competitive tournament arrangements about 13 percentage points more often than women.

That is a measurable average difference.

But then something interesting happened.

The gap became substantially smaller in several circumstances outside the traditional experimental setting—including some field environments, different age groups and when researchers used verbal rather than mathematical tasks.

Source: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122001251

So perhaps the lesson isn't simply:

Men are competitive and women aren't.

A better interpretation is:

Women and men sometimes respond differently to competition—and the environment helps determine how large that difference becomes.

That is considerably more useful when thinking about workplaces.

Women may lead somewhat differently

Leadership research provides another clue.

Some longstanding organizational research finds that women in leadership positions tend, on average, to use somewhat more democratic and participative leadership styles, while men tend somewhat more toward directive approaches.

But there is an important qualification.

Research examining actual managers has often found male and female leaders much more similar than popular stereotypes would suggest.

Subsequent meta-analytic research found women somewhat more likely to demonstrate transformational leadership—encouraging, mentoring and motivating followers—while men were somewhat more likely to demonstrate passive or laissez-faire leadership behaviours.

Then researchers asked the question that ultimately matters:

Who is more effective?

The answer was remarkably undramatic.

Across organizational and laboratory studies, male and female leaders were approximately equally effective overall.

Differences emerged depending upon the particular leadership environment rather than one sex demonstrating universal superiority.

Source: Psychological Bulletin
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7870858/

Perhaps that finding deserves more attention.

Institutions change people too

There is another possibility that discussions about “feminization” can overlook.

Women may change institutions.

But institutions also change women.

A female trial lawyer learns to argue.

A female surgeon learns to make rapid decisions under pressure.

A female chief executive learns to tolerate uncertainty and risk.

And the process works in the other direction.

A male nurse develops caregiving skills.

A male elementary-school teacher develops emotional attentiveness.

A father who becomes the primary caregiver may develop capacities his own father rarely had to exercise.

Human beings adapt.

That means an institution's culture cannot simply be predicted by counting the number of women and men inside it.

Professional norms matter.

Training matters.

Incentives matter.

Selection matters.

Leadership matters.

Culture matters.

What happens to performance?

This provides an important test of the larger argument.

If increasing female representation systematically makes institutions less capable of fulfilling their purposes, we should eventually be able to observe that deterioration in performance.

Corporate research gives us one place to look.

A meta-analysis examining 20 peer-reviewed studies involving 3,097 companies found essentially no overall relationship between the proportion of women on corporate boards and company financial performance.

Not strongly positive.

Not strongly negative.

Approximately zero overall.

Source: PLOS ONE
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130005

A considerably larger meta-analysis combining 140 studies produced a more nuanced result.

Greater female board representation was positively associated with accounting returns, particularly in countries with stronger shareholder protections.

Its relationship with stock-market performance was approximately zero overall.

Female board representation was also associated with greater board monitoring and involvement in strategy.

Source: Academy of Management Journal
https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2013.0319

These findings don't establish that adding women automatically improves organizations.

But neither do they support the idea that increasing female representation inherently damages them.

Diversity isn't magic either

There is an important warning for the other side of this debate.

It is tempting to respond to sweeping claims about the disadvantages of gender diversity with equally sweeping claims about its advantages.

The evidence doesn't justify that either.

Simply putting different people together does not automatically produce a brilliant team.

Different perspectives can expose assumptions and encourage better problem-solving.

They can also produce disagreement.

Whether that disagreement becomes productive debate or destructive conflict depends partly upon leadership and organizational culture.

The more useful question therefore isn't:

Is diversity good or bad?

It is:

Under what conditions does diversity improve the way people think and work together?

That is a much harder question.

But it is also a much more productive one.

What did the old workplace get right?

There is another side of this conversation that shouldn't be ignored.

Historically male professional environments sometimes encouraged characteristics that remain valuable.

Competition.

Resilience.

Direct disagreement.

Individual responsibility.

Risk-taking.

Emotional restraint under pressure.

A willingness to make unpopular decisions.

We should not discard useful qualities simply because they have traditionally been culturally associated with masculinity.

A healthy institution needs people willing to say:

“I think everyone else in this room may be wrong.”

Science requires it.

Journalism requires it.

Business requires it.

Democracy requires it.

And what did the old workplace get wrong?

Intellectual consistency requires asking the opposite question too.

Historically male-dominated workplaces were hardly perfect institutions awaiting disruption by women.

Some normalized:

Bullying.

Sexual harassment.

Exclusion.

Unnecessarily brutal working hours.

Excessive risk-taking.

Management through intimidation.

Silence around mental health.

And an assumption that serious professionals should have someone else quietly taking care of children, elderly parents and domestic life.

Some of those norms deserved to disappear.

The historical workplace contained strengths.

It also contained weaknesses.

Safety and disagreement are not necessarily opposites

One concern raised in contemporary debates is whether workplaces have become excessively concerned with psychological comfort.

There is a legitimate question here.

An organization in which nobody can tolerate disagreement will struggle to discover mistakes.

Science requires criticism.

Journalism requires uncomfortable questions.

Law requires adversarial argument.

Medicine sometimes requires delivering painful truths.

Business requires taking risks.

But the alternative is not necessarily an environment in which humiliation and intimidation are regarded as evidence of seriousness.

The real challenge is distinguishing:

Psychological safety

from

intellectual comfort.

People should be able to challenge one another's ideas vigorously.

They should also be able to do so without cruelty.

Those principles are not incompatible.

In fact, strong institutions probably require both.

The danger of turning tendencies into destinies

This is ultimately where broad claims about the “feminization” of institutions encounter their biggest evidentiary problem.

The demographic transformation is real.

Some average behavioural differences between women and men are also supported by research.

But moving from those observations to the conclusion that female-majority institutions must become less rational, less effective or less capable of applying impartial standards requires evidence that we simply do not have.

Average tendencies are not destinies.

And characteristics themselves are rarely inherently good or bad.

Empathy can distort judgment.

It can also make a physician better understand her patient.

Risk tolerance can produce innovation.

It can also produce catastrophic financial decisions.

Competition can produce excellence.

It can also prevent colleagues from sharing information.

Cohesion can suppress dissent.

It can also create enough trust for people to challenge one another openly.

The important question is not which sex possesses the better characteristics.

It is when particular characteristics help an institution accomplish its purpose.

Perhaps the best institutions need both

Maybe our future workplaces should not become more masculine.

Nor more feminine.

Perhaps they should become better at drawing upon a wider range of human strengths.

Empathy and reason.

Competition and cooperation.

Risk and caution.

Individualism and belonging.

Courage and compassion.

Direct disagreement and respect.

An excellent hospital needs physicians capable of understanding frightened patients—and surgeons capable of making unemotional decisions when seconds matter.

A healthy company needs people willing to challenge consensus—and people capable of creating enough trust that colleagues will listen.

A functioning legal system needs compassion for human circumstances—and rules that remain rules when sympathy pulls in another direction.

The difficult part is balance.

And what about men?

There is one final part of this transformation that deserves considerably more attention.

If women increasingly constitute the majority of university students and entrants to some prestigious professions, celebrating women's progress is no longer sufficient.

We should also ask what is happening to boys and young men.

Why are fewer men entering some forms of higher education?

Why have certain professions become less attractive to them?

Are some institutional environments inadvertently discouraging them?

Or are much broader economic and cultural changes responsible?

These questions deserve serious research.

Concern for women's opportunities and concern for boys and men are not competing moral projects.

A society can care about both.

Indeed, it probably should.

The experiment is already underway

There is something genuinely historic about what is happening.

Never before have human societies educated women at this scale or integrated them so extensively into medicine, law, science, business, government and academia.

Of course institutions will change.

Some changes will probably be improvements.

Others may produce unintended consequences.

And some things attributed to gender may ultimately prove to have much more to do with technology, economics, bureaucracy or generational change.

The sensible response is neither celebration nor alarm.

It is curiosity.

Ask difficult questions.

Measure what happens.

And be prepared for answers that don't fit comfortably into either side's assumptions.

Lydia's™ Take

For generations, women entering professional life were essentially told:

Here is the institution. Learn how to fit into it.

Women did.

Then something inevitable happened.

They began helping to shape the institutions themselves.

Perhaps the surprising outcome would be if nothing changed.

The provocative debate about the “feminization” of institutions therefore begins with a question worth asking.

But the available research points toward a more complicated answer.

Women and men sometimes bring different average tendencies into organizations.

Those differences overlap enormously.

Organizations also shape the people inside them.

Culture matters.

Leadership matters.

Incentives matter.

And neither traditionally masculine nor traditionally feminine characteristics possess a monopoly on wisdom.

Perhaps the workplace of the future should not require women to behave more like men.

Nor should it require men to behave more like women.

Perhaps it should become better at recognizing something we already understand from ordinary life:

Different situations require different human strengths.

Sometimes we need the person who says:

Let's think about how this affects everyone.

Sometimes we need the person who says:

I disagree.

Sometimes caution.

Sometimes courage.

Sometimes consensus.

Sometimes someone willing to stand alone.

The best institutions may ultimately be neither masculine nor feminine.

They may simply be wise enough to know when they need each.

Editorial Note

This article discusses research concerning average differences between groups of women and men. Statistical differences between populations should not be interpreted as predictions about any individual's personality, competence, leadership ability or behaviour.

The causes of observed differences are also complex and may include biological factors, socialization, cultural expectations, professional selection and institutional context. Researchers continue to debate their relative importance.

Helen Andrews's The Great Feminization is used here as the starting point for examining a broader question. Its arguments are Andrews's interpretations and should not themselves be treated as established scientific findings.