OP-ED: Dear NYT...Don’t Threaten Women with a Good Time

By now, I assume most of us have read last week’s infamous New York Times “think” piece about women “ruining” the workplace. Once the gold standard of American journalism, the Times is now the kind of publication that produces podcasts known for platforming insurrection apologists as they examine pretend concepts like “toxic empathy” and muse about the iPhone’s role in America’s declining birth rate. (If you ask me, they really screwed the pooch by not blaming women for this one too - talk about an airball, amirite?!)

Apparently, Douthat and NYT editorial leadership put so much careful thought into this episode of the Interesting Times podcast that they thought it worthy of transcribing into an Op-Ed that had to be renamed not once but TWICE because of the backlash it received. They simply never could have imagined that blaming an already marginalized group that makes up more than half of the nation’s population for the failures of a system that wasn’t built by and has historically excluded them...might not land as well as they’d hoped.

The headline originally asked readers to ponder the not at all problematic question, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” before it was noticeably unimproved with the revised “Have ‘Feminine Vices’ Taken Over the Workplace?” And because they’re seemingly very low on both brainpower and self-preservation instinct at the Times, they went on to change it just one more time. Do we all think differently now that it’s called “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” I, for one, am not sure. I think I need it to be changed to “Should Women Even Be Allowed to Work Anymore?” before I can really make up my mind about the very serious lady problem facing modern Corporate America.

At least the unflappable editors stood firm with the subhead of the article - that’s remained unchanged and has been taking up prime release estate in my ever-growing mental rolodex of NYT f*ck-ups. It asks in earnest: “Can conservative feminism fix it?” I don’t know - can any man tell you where literally anything is in the house that he’s lived in for the past 10 years? Why don’t you name another imaginary concept that only exists in the minds of famously forward thinkers like Sarah Palin? Kudos to digging the hole deeper than any of us thought possible, NYT! Because who needs to be burdened by critical thinking anyway? For conservative feminism to exist, you must have the cognitively deficient understanding of feminism to simply mean ‘letting women have thoughts and speak them out loud.’

As a communications and political science scholar with nearly 20 years of professional experience navigating the complexities of workplaces of vastly differing sizes, industries, and demographics, I can tell you with certainty based on something we used to call facts, that corruption, nepotism, wage theft, abuse of power, political oppression, and unsafe working conditions all existed long before women showed up to be part of the fun. Who ushered in the days of crony capitalism? Who was at the helm during the 2008 financial crisis? What brave leaders paved the way for the opioid epidemic, toxic banking culture, and massive fraud the likes of Enron?

Women didn’t inherit some pristine corporate Eden, but they’re certainly getting blamed for eating that damn apple again. Despite inheriting systems built by and for men, many of which were already failing all on their own terms, the NYT wants you to conflate the revelation of the problem with the problem itself. And there’s so much that the podcast fails to acknowledge here. The conversation completely ignores:

• The fact that DEI training, anti-harassment laws, safety protocols etc. were responses to existing problems, and again, are not the problem themselves.
• The research on the material benefits that women in leadership provide, from increased innovation, to less corruption, more transparency, better crisis management, and beyond.
• The reality that women are still disproportionately absent from positions of power. (How can it be that women, who hold just 10% of Fortune 500 CEO roles, earn less on average and are underrepresented at every leadership level, but are still somehow the main cause of a broken Corporate America? If women have “feminized” the workplace, you’d think that would translate into putting themselves in charge, no?)
• The notion that capitalism itself may be the true source of burnout, changing family dynamics, institutional dysfunction, billionaire supremacy, and the like. The research on the material benefits that women in leadership provide, from increased innovation, to less corruption, more transparency, better crisis management, and beyond.
• The faintest possibility that Gen Z is right about the structural injustices they observe in the workplace. (Like most other injustices, those who don’t wish to acknowledge their existence are conveniently the ones that benefit from them the most.)

If dysfunction in society’s foundational institutions is at an all-time-high, we should consider that our modern problems cannot be solved by continuing to operate in accordance with and perpetuate the traditional “masculine” norms we’ve been conned into believing are the only roadmap for success. Existential crises from AI and climate change to the collapse of American democracy and rise of global fascism cannot be solved with more conflict and less empathy.

TL;DR: This article asks whether women ruined the workplace instead of considering the possibility that the workplace was designed to ruin women from the start.