When Women Change the Workplace

Women have transformed the professions. Have the professions transformed too?

For much of modern history, a woman entering a prestigious profession entered a world built largely by men.

The partners were men.

The professors were men.

The physicians were men.

The judges were men.

The rules—written and unwritten—had developed in institutions where women were either absent or distinctly in the minority.

Women entering those worlds were often expected to adapt.

Today, something historically remarkable is happening.

In several professions, women are no longer newcomers.

They are becoming the majority.

And that raises an interesting—and uncomfortable—question:

When the people inside an institution change, does the institution itself change too?

A provocative argument

In October 2025, writer Helen Andrews offered a particularly controversial answer.

In an essay titled The Great Feminization, published in Compact, Andrews argued that increasing female participation has changed the culture of major Western institutions.

Her thesis goes considerably beyond saying that women bring different experiences to work.

She argues that institutions increasingly prioritize qualities she associates with female social behaviour—empathy rather than rationality, safety rather than risk, and cohesion rather than competition.

Andrews connects this transformation with changes she sees in academia, journalism, business, medicine and particularly law.

She makes an extraordinarily strong prediction about the last of these, arguing that the rule of law itself may not survive a majority-female legal profession.

Read Helen Andrews's original essay in Compact

The essay generated fierce criticism as well as considerable attention.

But underneath its deliberately provocative language lies a question worth taking seriously:

Does changing the gender composition of institutions change how those institutions behave?

The answer from research appears to be:

Sometimes.

But not nearly as simply as Andrews suggests.

The demographic change is real

On one point, Andrews is unquestionably correct.

The professional landscape has changed dramatically.

Consider medicine.

Women have now constituted the majority of applicants, matriculants and total enrollment in U.S. medical schools for seven consecutive years. In the 2025–26 academic year, women represented 57.2% of applicants and 55% of both new matriculants and total enrollment in MD-granting medical schools.

Law is moving in the same direction.

The American Bar Association reported that women made up 56.2% of U.S. law students in 2024. Women are also now the majority among federal government lawyers and law-firm associates.

Yet the upper reaches of the profession remain more male: in 2023, women accounted for only 28% of law-firm partners.

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 the conversation becomes difficult.

One response is to insist that there are essentially no meaningful behavioural differences between women and men.

Another is to assume that virtually every familiar stereotype is biologically predetermined.

Neither position adequately reflects the research.

Psychologists and economists have identified average sex differences in some behaviours—but the size of those differences varies substantially according to what is being measured, how it is measured and the social environment in which people are operating.

And most importantly:

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

There are highly competitive women and conflict-averse men.

Risk-taking women and cautious men.

Exceptionally empathetic men and remarkably unsympathetic women.

The distributions overlap enormously.

That matters whenever research about groups becomes a judgment about individuals.

What about empathy?

Andrews places considerable weight on empathy as a characteristically feminine quality.

There is some evidence behind the stereotype—but it is complicated.

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

Yet a fascinating 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 interestingly, when researchers manipulated expectations about male and female empathy, the questionnaire difference disappeared.

Other experimental work has found greater empathy and compassion among women while finding no female advantage in “theory of mind”—the ability to infer what another person is thinking or feeling.

So saying simply that “women are more empathetic” compresses a complicated scientific literature into a slogan.

Biology may matter.

Socialization may matter.

Expectations about how women and men should behave may matter too.

Researchers are still disentangling them.

What about competition?

Here Andrews stands on somewhat firmer empirical ground—but again, context changes the picture.

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

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

That is a genuine average difference.

But then something interesting happened.

The gap became much smaller—or nearly disappeared—outside the kinds of laboratory settings traditionally used to study competition. Differences were particularly small among other age groups, when tasks were verbal rather than mathematical, and in more realistic field environments.

In other words:

Men and women sometimes respond differently to competition, but institutions also influence how those differences appear.

That complicates any story in which male and female behaviour is simply fixed.

Women may lead somewhat differently

Leadership research provides another clue.

One of the longstanding findings in organizational psychology is that women in leadership positions tend, on average, to use somewhat more democratic and participative leadership styles, while men are somewhat more likely to use autocratic or directive approaches.

But early meta-analyses found little support for the stereotype that women managers are simply “people oriented” while men are “task oriented.” In actual organizations, male and female leaders often behaved much more similarly than stereotypes predicted.

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

And when researchers examined the ultimate question—effectiveness—the answer was remarkably unexciting.

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

Differences appeared depending on the particular leadership environment rather than one sex demonstrating universal superiority.

That finding deserves more attention than it usually receives.

Maybe institutions change people, too

There is another possibility that the “feminization” argument can easily 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 risk.

A male nurse develops caregiving skills.

A male kindergarten teacher learns patience and emotional attentiveness.

A father who becomes the primary caregiver may develop capacities that 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, incentives, selection, training and organizational culture matter too.

Does having more women actually hurt performance?

If feminization makes institutions less capable of accomplishing their fundamental purposes, as Andrews proposes, we should eventually be able to observe this in performance.

Here the evidence becomes particularly important.

Researchers have spent years studying gender composition in corporate leadership.

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

Not positive.

Not negative.

Effectively zero.

A much larger meta-analysis combining 140 studies reached a somewhat more nuanced conclusion.

Greater female board representation was positively associated with accounting returns, particularly in countries with stronger shareholder protections, but its relationship with stock-market performance was approximately zero overall.

Women on boards were also associated with greater monitoring and strategic involvement.

These results hardly prove that increasing female representation automatically improves institutions.

But they also provide little support for the proposition that women entering leadership systematically damages them.

Diversity itself is not magic

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

Simply putting women and men together does not automatically create brilliant teams.

Research on diversity and team performance is mixed.

A meta-analysis covering more than 20,000 teams across 178 studies found that informational diversity can stimulate task-related disagreement, and that task conflict can sometimes improve performance.

But conflict generally has costs as well.

Another meta-analysis examining gender diversity specifically found that its relationship with performance depended partly on the surrounding culture.

So slogans such as “diversity always makes organizations perform better” deserve the same scrutiny as claims that feminization makes them worse.

Human organizations are more complicated than either proposition.

What did male institutions get wrong?

There is another question we should ask.

If we're evaluating what may have been lost as historically male institutions became more gender-balanced, intellectual fairness requires asking what was wrong with the old institutions too.

The traditional workplace sometimes rewarded characteristics that were genuinely productive:

Competition.

Resilience.

Direct disagreement.

Individualism.

Risk-taking.

Emotional restraint.

A willingness to make difficult decisions.

These qualities should not automatically be discarded merely because we associate some of them culturally with masculinity.

But male-dominated institutions could also normalize less admirable behaviours.

Bullying.

Sexual harassment.

Exclusion.

Excessive risk-taking.

Unnecessarily brutal working hours.

A belief that caregiving responsibilities demonstrated insufficient professional commitment.

Management through intimidation.

Silence around mental health.

The historical workplace was not an optimization problem that men had already solved before women arrived.

It contained strengths and weaknesses of its own.

Perhaps safety isn't always the enemy of excellence

Andrews is particularly concerned with institutions becoming excessively concerned with psychological or emotional safety.

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.

A culture that treats every disagreement as personal injury would indeed have serious problems.

But the alternative is not necessarily a return to environments where humiliation or intimidation are considered evidence of seriousness.

The challenge is to distinguish psychological safety from intellectual comfort.

People should be able to disagree vigorously.

They should also be able to do so without cruelty.

Those ideas are not opposites.

The danger of turning tendencies into destinies

This is ultimately where The Great Feminization becomes less persuasive.

Andrews begins with an observable demographic change.

She then identifies some behavioural differences for which there is at least partial empirical support.

But she makes a much larger leap from those differences to claims about institutional decline.

The evidence does not justify that leap.

Women may, on average, sometimes be less attracted to certain forms of competition.

Women leaders may sometimes manage more collaboratively.

Some measures find women more empathetic.

But none of these findings establishes that a female-majority profession becomes incapable of rationality, truth-seeking, risk-taking or the consistent application of rules.

Nor does the existence of average sex differences tell us whether those differences are beneficial or harmful in a particular institution.

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 allow teams to trust one another enough to take risks.

The virtue lies partly in knowing when each quality is appropriate.

Maybe the best institutions need both

Perhaps the most useful conclusion isn't that our institutions should become more masculine or more feminine.

Perhaps they need characteristics traditionally associated with both.

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 building 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 perhaps men need a place in this conversation too

There is another consequence of the changing professional landscape that deserves attention.

If women increasingly dominate university enrollment and some professions, simply celebrating female advancement is no longer enough.

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

Why are fewer entering some forms of higher education?

Why have certain professions become unattractive to them?

Are institutions inadvertently signalling that characteristics more common among young men are undesirable?

Or are economic and cultural changes occurring outside those institutions that better explain the shift?

Andrews interprets growing female majorities partly as evidence that men are being driven away by feminized institutional cultures.

That is possible in some circumstances.

But demographic change alone cannot prove the mechanism.

This deserves research rather than assumption.

Concern for women's opportunities and concern for struggling boys and men do not have to compete.

A society can care about both.

The experiment is already underway

There is something genuinely historic about the transformation Andrews identifies.

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

We should be curious about what happens.

Some institutional cultures probably will change.

Some changes will be improvements.

Others may produce unintended consequences.

And some things we attribute to gender may turn out to have much more to do with technology, economics, generational change or organizational bureaucracy.

The sensible response is not to declare the experiment a failure.

Nor should we insist in advance that every consequence must necessarily be positive.

We should look at the evidence.

Lydia's™ Take

For generations, women entering professional life were essentially told:

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

Women did.

And then something inevitable happened.

They began helping to shape the institutions themselves.

Perhaps the surprising thing would be if nothing changed.

Helen Andrews is therefore asking a question worth asking.

But her answer asks too much of the evidence.

Women have not simply replaced rationality with empathy, risk with safety or competition with cohesion.

The research describes something considerably more interesting.

Women and men sometimes bring different tendencies into organizations.

But those differences overlap enormously.

Organizations shape the people inside them.

Culture matters.

Leadership matters.

Incentives matter.

And neither masculine nor 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 know 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 we need 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. Such findings describe statistical tendencies and should not be interpreted as predictions about individual ability, personality or behaviour. Sex differences may reflect combinations of biology, socialization, cultural expectations, selection and institutional context, and researchers continue to debate their relative importance.