On November 6th, The New York Times released a podcast episode originally titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” After the predictable backlash, the headline changed to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” The quick title change already tells you something about the conversation inside the episode. It gestures at controversy without ever really being willing to sit with what the controversy is actually about.
Listening to the episode, what stood out most to me wasn’t the clickbait question in the title. What struck me was how confidently the female guests talked about men and women like they are two completely opposite species. The discussion relied on the framework that men are direct, competitive, and good at handling conflict, and women are emotional and drawn to “care.” Almost every institutional failure the guests disliked was labeled “feminine,” while the traits they admired were described as “masculine.” This framing doesn’t just feel outdated, it feels lazy. Have they not stepped outside and seen the many examples of men and women who do not fit in this limiting framework? These two women came on a podcast to discuss books that they wrote and debate their stances. Though I disagree with their opinions, I believe they are showcasing that they are direct, competitive, and good at handling conflict, all supposedly “male” traits according to them. Do they really sell themselves short just because they believe women are not these things?
The episode’s main claim is that institutions have been “feminized” and that this feminization explains everything from DEI statements to Title IX processes and workplace norms around harassment. But this argument never wrestles with the basic reality that solely male run institutions have produced just as many moral dilemmas and horrible failures. If “feminine vices” are the cause of institutional breakdown, how do we explain all of those male failures?
At one point, the host brings up McCarthyism to challenge Helen Andrews’s whole framework. If witch hunts and moral panics are supposedly “feminine,” he asks, then how do we explain the Red Scare, which unfolded entirely under male authority? Andrews insists McCarthyism was actually “masculine” because it used loyalty oaths, which she describes as a clear, rule-based attempt to stop gossip, which is “feminine”. The mental game she is playing to recast the entire Red Scare, a national panic driven by suspicion and fear, as an example of “masculine clarity” says a lot about her confirmation bias.
Rather than reconsidering her theory, she is literally bending history around it.
The thing I was waiting for the conversation to address was the actual force reshaping work today. Things like impossible hours, unpredictable schedules, burnout, wages versus rising housing prices, and the basic insecurity of American employment are the problems I hear students talk about. These are the pressures that make young people feel their lives cannot move forward positively. But instead of discussing any of that, the episode stayed fixated on gender traits, as these theorists clearly think blaming women for common issues is easier than questioning the structure of work itself.
Leah Libresco Sargeant’s argument, that liberal feminism forces women to pretend their bodies do not matter, comes closer to something real. The modern workplace absolutely fails to support pregnancy, caregiving, or dependence of any kind in many ways. But Sargeant’s analysis is still diluted by her attempt to treat “male” and “female” as categories that determine how someone moves through the world. She sees dependence as a woman’s territory and risk as a man’s. To me, that just seems like a way of making structural injustice sound in their nature. It shifts the blame from the architects of the workplace to the people who have to move through it.
The host kept trying to get to something important, which was relieving in the midst of these women arguing against their own strengths. If we actually believe men and women will keep working together in the same institutions, what does a healthy workplace look like? What would it mean for men and women to coexist without forcing everyone into one mold? But instead of answering, the conversation slipped back into the same dumb logic: women have vices, men have virtues, institutions fall apart when women enter them. The whole thing began to sound like an argument that already knew its conclusion before it started.
In the end, the question “Did liberal feminism ruin the workplace?” was never really the point. The real question should be whether the workplace was ever designed for people at all. It was built long ago for a single breadwinner with a wife at home, with long hours and total availability. It was built around a model that never matched the lives most people actually live, including men.
So, women didn’t ruin the workplace. Nor did feminism ruin the workplace. The workplace was never built to support human beings. All feminism did was expose the cracks that were already there.
