What is toxic femininity? Gossiping, inability to deal with conflict directly and suppressing conflict and aversion to directness which naturally in a workplace is a big problem because you need to be able to give direct feedback to people, including negative feedback. I think some of what you’re describing is not exclusively feminine and it’s strange to characterize it so strongly in that direction. It’s a product of human beings being bad at group dynamics in a variety of ways that men can fail at, women can fail at. And it happens in male- dominated places, too, where they’re explicitly doing truth-seeking because it’s very hard as a discipline to value the truth more than your own pride. We say sometimes that pride can be, I think, a masculine vice as well as a feminine vice. And both men and women have trouble loving the truth more than they love their image of someone — themselves as someone who already knew it. Is that the primary thing that you think is lost in institutions that undergo what you’re calling feminization? The failure to seek truth? I think that’s right. And I think that’s why the harms or perils of feminization have to be examined on a case-by-case basis for each institution and discipline. I think something like 80 percent of veterinary students are women today. Are they doing a bad job at treating —— -Are you worried—— -Yeah. -Are you worried —— -Do you predict they are? -Right. As far as I know, this has not had catastrophic effects. Why? Well, actually, Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, notes in her book that male veterinarians are more likely to own their own practices, whereas female veterinarians prefer not to. Because being an owner involves more financial risk and longer and less flexible hours. So the shift from a male- dominated profession to a female-dominated profession in the area of veterinary medicine has led to corporatization that we’ve gone from a world where most veterinarians own their own practices to one where most veterinary practices are owned by private equity, which has not been entirely without problems for the pets and farm animals of America. But I am willing to state that, corporatization aside, the feminization of veterinary medicine has not led to the collapse of society and is unlikely to do so. I think it’s basically fine. What’s the protective element there? Or what can be learned from veterinary medicine to take into white-collar work? It just seems odd that you’re describing this general dynamic that women — you say would undermine completely the rule of law, that will lose the rule of law in our lifetimes, when women become the majority of lawyers. If it’s that stark in law, I’d expect, if your claim is true, some erosion in veterinary medicine or pharmacy, which is also dominated by women, and where you can track the failures because people die.
