Transcript: Cory Clark
An interview with the American behavioural scientist
With 2025 winding down, we at Lean Out wanted to take a look back at one of the most controversial stories of the year — and to see if we could have a calm, reasonable conversation about a divisive issue. I’m talking about the feminization theory, or the idea that the shifting sex ratios in influential institutions comes with both positive and negative consequences. My guest on the program this week is a scholar who is studying that phenomenon. Her recent paper, for the Journal of Controversial Ideas, is “From Worriers to Warriors: The Cultural Rise of Women.”
Cory Clark is an American behavioural scientist. She’s an associate professor of psychology at New College of Florida and director of the Adversarial Collaboration Project.
This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.
TH: It’s so nice to have you on. I’ve been following your work for some time, so it is great to have you on the show. I wanted us to talk through one of the more controversial stories of 2025, which is this idea of the feminization of professional life. Helen Andrews, of course, wrote a pretty explosive piece for Compact Magazine this fall, and at the same time you released an academic paper on this subject in the Journal of Controversial Ideas. You open that paper with the observation that “for the first time in history, women hold substantial cultural and institutional power.” You point out “just 70 years ago, women had virtually no representation in culturally important institutions,” but that women have now “surpassed men in many domains.” In my own industry, for example, women now outnumber men at the New York Times. So, we are living through this dramatic and rapid shift in sex ratios. I was hoping we could talk through the significance of that in a calm and non-inflammatory way. And also just as two women who know that women are, like all other human beings, a mixed bag of traits. To start, let’s just outline the feminization thesis that you dive into. What is it and how do you measure it?
CC: Yeah. Setting aside the feminization aspect of it, we can see that women’s numbers have grown in powerful cultural institutions. The one that I mainly focus on is academia. But it’s also true in journalism. It’s also true in politics. And if you take those three, those are probably three of the most impactful institutions in terms of shaping cultural conversations: What are we prioritizing, what do we care about? Across all three of those, women have made enormous strides, going from having virtually no representation at all in politics, academia, and journalism. There’s a story with the New York Times how, I think it’s in the fifties or sixties, they were all writing for food, fashions, and furnishings. They’re just writing about things about homes. But now women, of course, are writing about politics. They’re writing about big, important things that actually shape our culture and our cultural conversations.
We can see that women’s numbers have grown. In some places women are certainly not the majority — they’re still not the majority in politics, for example. We still haven’t had a female president. However, their numbers have grown substantially and rapidly. So, the demographic composition of important cultural institutions has changed radically.
There is tons and tons and tons of research on psychological sex differences between men and women. I focus on this from an evolutionary framework because I think it’s the most correct way to think about it. But even for people who are skeptics of evolutionary psychology, there’s little dispute that men and women have different psychological characteristics.
Let’s just take those two facts — that men and women have different psychological characteristics, men and women care about different things, they prioritize different things — and then you radically change the demographic composition of institutions. It’s just implausible to me that that would have no consequence, that we would see no change as a result of that shift. It almost doesn’t even make sense just from a purely mathematical, statistical perspective.
And so I look at, well, what are the shifts we should expect and what are the shifts we see? The three that I focused on are an increasing prioritization of harm avoidance — basically trying to minimize potential harms. I talk about the prioritization of equality, of equity. Women are more egalitarian. They want outcomes to be distributed more equally. Men are a little bit more comfortable with hierarchy, and so they are more meritocratic as well. [They are] okay with, “Well, some people are going to perform really well and some people are going to perform really terribly, and that’s okay.” That bothers women a little bit more.
Unlike men, who tend to deal with conflict head-on — men are more violent, they kill people sometimes when they’re engaged in conflict — women deal with conflict through social exclusion and ostracism. When somebody is perceived as posing a potential threat to a woman, or to her social group, or to what she considers to be a moral value worth protecting, she’s more inclined to deal with that by trying to get rid of that person from her social world. Kicking them out, making sure that person doesn’t have a voice, that that person’s excluded totally from the social group. And forever. Those are the changes that I focus on.
In terms of having a non-inflammatory conversation, it is important to note that both men and women have positive traits and negative traits. And even these ones I’m talking about — like a preference for egalitarianism — that’s certainly not necessarily a bad thing. It can potentially have bad consequences if it’s applied in contexts where … One thing I focus on, for example, is grade inflation. It’s been a big conversation for really the past few years, but even longer than that — that students’ grades have been climbing and climbing and climbing. They are continuing to climb present day, to the point where the average GPA at Harvard, I think, is 3.97. But even the average GPA in high schools and other colleges has continued to climb.
There are studies looking at men and women and their grade distributions, and women tend to give more uniformly positive grades. Which on the one hand is probably really nice for the students; they’re all getting straight As. However, it does make it harder to distinguish the truly talented and hardworking students and place them in the proper programs. Who do we want getting into Harvard med school and becoming tomorrow’s neurosurgeons? We want highly talented people. And if we can’t distinguish talent from less talent, then that can be a problem.
I certainly wouldn’t say feminization is destroying civilization. And I also am not totally pessimistic either. I think cultures are responsive and flexible, and if there are problems that have been caused by the increasing representation of women in powerful institutions, we will identify those problems and we will adjust to them. But I think, yeah, the first step is being able to talk about it in the first place. Which can be challenging, given that of course it’s a bit of a controversial subject.
TH: Yes, indeed. You mentioned the evolutionary reasons for these differences. I know a lot of people are very skeptical about these evolutionary differences — including, actually, Helen Andrews herself. But you do spend some time on this in the paper. But the fact of the matter is that men and women, on average — not individually but on average — do differ in their values and priorities, and we don’t talk about this much in society. Can you just give us a brief recap of that?
CC: So, the framework that I use, that I think is really memorable and intuitive, is Joyce Benenson’s framework, where she refers to men as warriors and women as worriers. What that is doing is highlighting a primary difference between men and women, in terms of what they should value from an evolutionary perspective. Men competed in these hierarchical, meritocratic coalitions against other men — to kill other men, and take their resources, and get access to their women. For a man to be evolutionarily successful, what he needs to do is get access to women. And the way he does that is by competing in a hierarchical coalition with other men and competing against other men. So, their psychology is kind of wired around this coalitional competition — “How do I increase my status in my own group, prove to my peers that I’m the best one among them, get status that way?” — and then organize these really competent coalitions that will defeat and kill enemy coalitions.
Women weren’t really doing that so much. What women have to do to be evolutionarily successful — that is, to have offspring, to pass their genes on — is that they had to care for and keep their children alive. And the way you keep your children alive is by staying alive yourself. So, women are called worriers because they had to care about the well-being of themselves, keep themselves alive, eliminate any potential threats from their environments, and care for vulnerable others. And so, women care more about vulnerable others than men. They are more willing to help people that seem to need help. And they are more threat-averse.
One way men got status was by showing that they are brave, that they will take risks, that they will sacrifice their own life and well-being for their group. That was not beneficial to women. Women benefited by staying alive to care for their offspring. And so women avoid harm, they avoid risks. Again, relative to men; there are plenty of risk-taking women out in the world. These are average differences. But if you look at a lot of the psychological differences between men and women that have been documented by evolutionary psychologists, they do kind of fit in this framework where men are trying to climb these meritocratic hierarchies to get status in their group and compete against enemy groups and women are trying to protect themselves and their offspring. They are more nurturing. They are a little bit more distressed by massive social groups.
If you look at differences even between little boys and girls, little boys want to play in large groups of peers and they want to compete and they want to know who won and who lost. Whereas little girls — they want to play more in dyads, and they like to play games where there is no winner and loser. They are just forming a relationship. They are forming a friendship between the two of them. And so, if you look at differences from little boys and girls up through men and women, these differences are observed all the way through.
So, men and women are oriented to different people in different ways. Women are looking for people who are potentially posing a threat. They are trying to avoid people who are posing risks to them. Men are looking for people who are going to join their coalition and be really competent and help their group get better. Take, for example, social exclusion. Because coalitions that are bigger tend to be better — if you have more people in your group, you’re more likely to beat other groups — this means that men are attracted to building up maximally large groups surrounding them. They can’t afford to just be kicking people out of the group, because if another group comes along that’s bigger, they’re going to get destroyed. So, they have to have this high level of tolerance for other people in their group, even if those people maybe are kind of shady and they don’t really like them. They can’t just kick people out.
Women, in contrast, are more focused on narrowing their social group to a trustworthy core. They want a smaller but highly trustworthy, high-quality group of people surrounding them. When men get into a conflict, they will often punch the person — that person loses status, but they stay in the group, usually. Whereas with women, if there’s a conflict, it’s more likely that’s never going to recover. If two women get into a fight — let’s say they’re friends to start with — it’s more likely that friendship is over. It will never recover.
When a woman identifies another person as posing a potential threat to her own status or well-being, or the status or wellbeing of her children, she wants that person gone — not only from her immediate social world. But anybody in her social world, she doesn’t want them affiliating with that person either. That’s why I talk about cancel culture. This is a more feminine strategy. We’re not just saying, “Hey, you did something wrong. We’re going to make you feel bad about it, but you’re only going to get punished for a couple days, and then you’re back in good standing, and you’re going to get the opportunity to prove that you can be a contributing member to society.” What you have with cancel culture is: “You do one thing wrong, you’re done forever. You are not allowed to have friends. You are not allowed to have a job. Anybody who employs you — they’re bad too.” So, you create this guilt-by-association culture. That’s a more female strategy. Once a person is tainted, they are tainted forever. And in the eyes of everyone.
TH: It’s so interesting with cancel culture. I myself was the subject of an online pile-on a few years back.
CC: Not fun.
TH: No, it wasn’t fun. Every single online instigator was female. I had a number of hit pieces written about me, and every single hit piece was written by a female. I started thinking about this and eventually wrote a paper for Fairer Disputations, a feminist journal, about women and cancel culture. It’s also interesting when you look through Greg Lukianoff’s book, The Canceling of the American Mind. I’ve given you the anecdotal; now I’ll give you more of a data point. When you look through his book, he has case study after case study. When he came on the podcast, I said, “Did you happen to notice that the instigators in many of those cases are also female? And yet it is very controversial still to say this.” What’s your thinking on the cancel-culture piece, and why is it so hard to say what I’ve just said?
CC: I actually talked to Greg about that, too. He’s like, “It was hard not to notice those patterns.” And if you look at FIRE [Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] data, if you look at data collected by similar studies … I’ve done studies looking at psychology professors — but if you look at everyday people, if you look at college students, women are more likely to, for example, oppose any kind of controversial speech. They want to get any kind of controversial speaker cancelled, fired, ostracized, punished. In my study with psychology professors — again, we’re looking at a sample of highly educated, smart, professionally successful women who have PhDs in psychology and great jobs — but even among them, they are more likely, if somebody says something that they find potentially offensive or harmful to people they care about, women are more likely to say that we should punish, ostracize, name-call, shame that person, forbid them from taking on any kind of leadership roles. Or that they shouldn’t be allowed to give talks at conferences, things like that.
So, we see that women are more supportive of all of the characteristic behaviours of cancel culture. They want to de-platform people and fire them more than men do. And there was another study — I think this was by Eric Kaufmann — and he looked at a bunch of academics, both grad students, undergrads, and professors, I believe, in the UK, U.S., and Canada. He looked at: If a scholar publishes a potentially offensive paper, what should happen to this scholar? And females are always more likely to want to sign a petition to fire that person or punish that person, and men are always more likely to want to sign a counter-petition to say that person shouldn’t be fired.
So, the data there — I am not sure I’ve seen a single counter-case where it was a study that found the opposite. Women are generally more supportive of cancel-culture behaviour: name-calling online, ostracism, and getting people fired.
I think it’s hard to talk about because of a couple of reasons. One I would say is sort of biological, which is that we care more about protecting women than we do about protecting men. And so, we really don’t like to say bad things about women. This is true of both men and women. If you look at studies, when you look at anything positive or negative about men or women, people are more receptive to negative information about men than they are to negative information about women. They just don’t like people saying bad things about women. And this feels like a bad thing. It feels like we’re saying that women are mean — like the “mean-girl” culture. People don’t like to say that about women. It seems nasty. We want to be nice to women.
But the other thing is I think there’s concern — and some of it’s certainly legitimate — that these conversations are going to undo a lot of progress that we have made for women. Women had to work their butts off to get into these positions of power and status. And it turns out women are super competent. So when you look at tests between men and women, women are legitimately as competent as men in so many different domains that they were formerly excluded from. And so, it seems like we’ve reached a point in society and culture where we appreciate the fact that women are very competent, and now all of a sudden we’re like, “Oh hey, their personalities are a problem.” So, I think those are the reasons that it’s hard to talk about. But I think those are not reasons for despair. Again, because both men and women have positives and negatives.
An example that I give in the paper: Men commit 95 percent of the homicide and rape. This is a bad thing that men are much more likely to do than women. And just because men are way more violent than women doesn’t mean we say that they don’t get to participate in culture, they don’t get to vote, they don’t get to be president, they don’t get to be CEOs. Rather, we say, “This is a problem. Let’s figure out a way of managing this.” And we have. We have criminal-justice systems that were designed, for the most part, to deal with the dysfunctional aspects of men. Now that women are in institutions, we can see some of these things [with them], like, “Hey, maybe we don’t like that. Maybe we don’t want our institution to be the kind of place where a mob will pile onto somebody who maybe did something bad but not so bad — maybe they said the wrong thing, they made an insensitive joke, whatever, they made a mistake — but it’s not like ‘we should lock this person in prison for the rest of their life’ kind of mistake. We don’t want to be the kind of institution or culture that allows mobs to pile on and ruin someone’s life.”
So, there can be a new response to that: “We’re not going to entertain petitions in this organization. If you have a complaint, you can file it with HR, it will be evaluated, and the right-sized punishment will occur. It’s not going to be a life-ending punishment” — or rather, a career-ending punishment. So yeah, I think people are worried that if we talk about this honestly, it’s going to interfere with women’s progress. And I say that it doesn’t have to. We just need to find ways of dealing with any negative aspects, and in the meantime we can get the benefits of the positive aspects of female contributions, as we do with male contributions. So yeah, I’m not a doomster about it necessarily. At least not yet.
TH: Your work is referenced in that viral Helen Andrews essay, and the video of the National Conservatism speech that she gave — that that essay is based on — has now been viewed some 245,000 times. So, she clearly struck a chord, and your work is very relevant to that. I guess I just want to ask you, just off the top, before we dig into some of the response to that debate, what did you make of her argument? What did Helen Andrews get right and what did she maybe not get right, in your view?
