Why Young Women Are More Woke

People always ask what is the definition of woke. Well, the definition of woke, as I mentioned in the book, is the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. That's it; that's the one-sentence definition. That is also what I would describe as the kind of big bang of our moral order. Out of that emerges a kind of very fuzzy folk ideology, which says, um, so these are the sacred groups. Those groups cannot be offended. So anything you say that might be interpreted by the most sensitive member of such a group as offensive marks you out as a blasphemer. You're profaning the sacred; you must be excommunicated, i.e., canceled.

The other part of this is absolute equality in terms of prestigious positions and resources between these groups. So, for example, you can't have a race gap or a gender gap in terms of the boardroom, in terms of admittance to elite universities, and so on. It's got to be zero. So, equality plus emotional safety; these are the two pillars of this ideology. But the point I make is this ideology is not some kind of system, like loan liberalism or even Marxism; it is more of a bottom-up empathizing rather than a top-down systematizing cognitive thing. It's much more emotional.

We're attached concretely to the Black civil rights movement, to the indigenous, to the LGBT movements, and it's our romanticization and sympathy for these concrete groups that provides our meaning, and that's primary in the system. It's not a set of ideas like Marxism; it's actually a set of emotional attachments, and so this is very much emotional and it's driven from the ground up.

Okay, so let me ask you some questions about that. Okay, so I guess you pulled out two strings there. You did associate the system of ideas with liberal progressivism, let's say starting in the early 20th century, but then you are also stressing the more emotional side of it. Let's call it the compassionate side. I want to ask you, and you talked about it as bottom-up and emotion-driven. So, it seems to me that the analysis of the woke phenomena has revealed a number of potentially fundamental causal elements. You pointed to liberal progressivism and compassion and the role of emotion.

Let's say other people have pointed to the role of like a kind of metam Marxism. The Marxists, of course, divided the world into victim and victimizer essentially on economic grounds. The difference now is that that same narrative seems to play out. There are victims and there are victimizers, but there is a number of dimensions along which that axis of inequality can reveal itself. You talked about race, gender, and sexuality; there are other axes as well, but those are likely the primary ones.

With regards to the emotional side, this is something I can't help wondering about, and no one is talking about it. I can understand why. We did a series of studies that were published in 2016, which was pretty much when I left the university, so it never got completed. But we identified a group of ideas that hung together statistically that we called politically correct authoritarianism, deviated to some degree from, say, the liberal progressivist ethos, in that the people who adopted the set of ideas were perfectly willing to use compulsion and force.

That being perhaps the primary distinction, the predictor that we found that determined whether or not people adopted those beliefs were, first of all, low verbal intelligence; that was a walloping predictor. The second one was being female, and the third one was having a female temperament. The fourth one was having ever taken even one politically correct course. So, one of the things I'm very curious about, see, I've been thinking that one of the things we’re seeing is the increased female domination of the university system, especially in the humanities and the social sciences.

I think there's a fundamental feminine ethos that's instinctive, that can be made more sophisticated with genuine education, but that has a proclivity to divide the world up into predators and infants. And woe betide you if you happen to fall into the Predator camp. It's very tightly allied with the victim-victimizer narrative. You do point out in your book that there is a predilection for women between the ages of 18 and 34, and this is being shown everywhere. They're way out of lockstep with every other demographic group, way more progressive, far more radically left, way more likely to, for example, claim that the Hamas terrorists are victims in some sense, which is just an absolute miracle of interpretation.

So, we've identified a number of streams: there's a Marxist influence, there's a postmodern influence which we haven't talked about, there's a liberal progressive influence, there's an emotional influence. And then, I don't know if you have any specific thoughts about how the increasing female domination, especially of the humanities and the social sciences, plays into that because that's a major league cultural revolution. The fact that the universities are dominated, for example, administratively, as well, by females. So, I know that's a hell of a thing to ask you to talk about right off the bat, but I think that's actually really interesting, and I think it is a contributing factor.

But I just want to sort of put in a couple of caveats. The first is we only see this female effect amongst young people. Older women, we don't find greater support for cancel culture. It's very much seems to be among young women. The second thing is if you were to go back to 1970, for example, women were, you know, there's a survey done every year in the US Higher Education Research Institute, 100,000 freshman 18-year-olds entering American universities. In 1970, women were somewhat more conservative than men, 18-year-old women and 18-year-old men.

It's really not till 2004 we start to see those 18-year-old women starting to be more liberal than the men, and that's now widened to about 15 points. Something's happened to women in the recent period; that's the first point to note. And the other thing is that FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression, does an annual survey in the US, 55,000. There’s a lot of survey data in the book; I try and ground this as much as possible in the data.

So, they ask questions, for example, is it okay to shout down or block somebody from speaking? On those questions, actually, especially using violence to prevent somebody from speaking, women are less likely than men to support that. On blocking, they're about as likely, where women really stand out is should a speaker come to campus who wants to say something that might be offensive. So, for example, to say that BLM is a hate group, that says trans is a mental disorder. There you see a big gender gap, and you see it also amongst Republican women, by the way, versus Republican men.

So, it seems like the attitude—the sort of there's the authoritarian “I want to do violence,” which is, I think, not gendered, or it may even be somewhat more male—but there's this protective, “Oh, I don't want anyone's feelings to be hurt,” and that I think is more female. So, I think there are some nuances here. What I would say, I mean, the way I think about it is women will tend to back up whatever is the moral order. If the moral order is a woke moral order, they'll back that up. If it's a religious or patriotic moral order, they'll be more likely to back that up, whereas men will be more likely to be the contrarians.

People will talk about, "Well, women are more compassionate," but the point is compassionate to who? Like compassionate to… well, that is the point, that’s for sure! That's the point. So, compassionate to the transitioner or the detransitioner? Compassionate to the biological male who wants to enter a women's shelter or women's prison, or to the women in the prison? I mean, the ideology is what tells you who to be compassionate towards.

So, if we go back to the liberal progressives, Jane Addams was relatively PR lynching, or at least thought that wasn't a bad idea because she was very empathetic towards white women, and so she was willing to accept that there were these Black male predators and buy into that framing. So what I'm just saying is I think what's happened is an ideology has crept in and told women who to be compassionate towards and who not to care about.

Okay, so your point fundamentally is that, I believe, is that the ideology specifies the victim-victimizer dimension and identifies the victim. Now do you think—when we did our study, it was agreeable; I said it was being female and having a female temperament, those were both predictors. We never saw that in any study we ever did looking at what predicted beliefs, for example. If generally, if we controlled for temperament, sex had no effect, but that wasn't the case in this specific situation, which I thought was extremely telling.

It's also very interesting, as you pointed out, that it's young women in particular, and I can't help, as someone who is, you know, psychoanalytically influenced, I can't help but think that a fair chunk of this is misplaced maternal instinct. I believe that the young women, who are in by and large childless in the years when they shouldn't be, are unbelievably sensitive. Well, let's talk about what happened in 2004. You know, you said that's when women started to shift their political priorities.

Now I know from people who've been investigating this that TikTok is a particularly pernicious influence, especially with regards to the campus protests that are occurring right now. The TikTok short videos that are fostering that, the campus protests, at least among women, focus on compassion for the war victims to the ultimate degree. They seem to be extraordinarily effective, but there's a real problem here that needs to be wrestled with because, if it is the case that young women are differentially sensitive to a certain kind of propaganda and they often, and they also increasingly occupy the majority positions in university institutions, for example, then we have a whole new kind of social problem on our hands, because we've never had—it's only been in the last 30 years that we've had the opportunity to see what female-dominant large institutions would look like, right?

That's historically unprecedented. We have no idea what pathologies or advantages those systems might have. So, what do you think happened in 2004? Like, why did the tide start to turn then?

So, my interpretation—there's other data series that we can see changing. So, political donations shifting towards the Democrats, for example, around roughly the same time. Now political donations come from people who are highly educated, relatively well-off, for example. I think what happens in the US, anyway, is you get George W. Bush, who’s more of a populist, not an elite-style conservative who’s just about tax and spend, for example. I actually think you see, you know, he’s also, to some degree, advancing the agenda of the religious right to some degree.

I think this populist-style cultural conservatism doesn't work as well with the elite opinion formers, and so they start to drift away in terms of political donations. The—if you like—the kind of background, the ambient noise, the mood music that is coming through the elite institutions, the schools, the culture, just starts to turn against Republicans and conservatism, for example. So, I actually think women are a kind of rof—they kind of reflect what is the dominant ethos in a society or at least at the prestige ethos in a society.

So, if we actually swung the ethos against wokeism, I think women would be in the forefront of that. I don't think there's anything biological, so I am a more of a sociologist and political scientist, so I tend to approach these things from a kind of sociology of emotions perspective, which says that ideas can tell you which emotions to turn off and which emotions to express. Now, of course, that's refracted through things like gender.

So, in this case, I think women will just back up and reinforce the dominant values, the dominant ideology of the elites in a society. So, I'm not as convinced. Why do you think it's—okay, why would women specifically back up the dominant ideology of the elites? Is it—do you think that's a consequence of something like hypergamy, or what's your theory about that? Because it's weird. If they're also standing up for the underdogs, is it that they accept the elite differentiation of who's an underdog and who's a power monger? And then, and then why is that associated with youth, let's say, with women? I'm trying to disentangle all that.

Well, I think there are a couple of things. I mean, one is the education system, which I think shifts in this direction in a big way. I mean, it was there in a few radical centers like Berkeley and the Toronto District School Board and Greater London Council. So, you had these crazy places, but what's happened is scaling up. So, what my book talks a lot about is these ideas actually go back quite a long way, but it's the scaling up now; it's in every school.

So, I did a couple of studies with the Manhattan Institute; you know, 90% of 18 to 20-year-old Americans that I interviewed, you know, sent the survey to, said that they had encountered at least one critical race theory concept from an adult in school. In Britain, it was about, you know, a majority as well—not as high, but a majority. So, it's hitting saturation level. So, that's what women are getting in class, and then they see it in the institutions that maybe in the workplace, in the government.

So, they're seeing this thing, DEI, everywhere, and so they think, “Yeah, this is the way you have to be a good moral person,” and they simply reinforce those values.