Diabolical Lies - November 30, 2025


Did Women Ruin the Workplace？


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

165.64

Word count

1,221

Sentence count

35

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Today's episode was brought to you by Larry Summers, Ezra Klein's flop sweat from the relief
00:00:05.660 of not being the most reviled New York Times opinion columnist this month, our culture's
00:00:10.460 dogged commitment to finding a way, no matter how improbable or ridiculous, to blame women
00:00:15.040 for everything we don't like, the religious studies department at Yale, which made the
00:00:19.280 unfortunate decision to credential the most citation-averse woman on planet Earth, Helen
00:00:23.100 Andrews, and my campaign, commencing henceforth to rename this podcast Feminine Vices. 0.92
00:00:30.000 what a joy so caroline today we are talking about women ruining the workplace because of course we 0.90
00:00:38.160 are because this topic was designed in a lab specifically to provoke you and me and folks we 1.00
00:00:42.880 are taking the bait happily taking the bait as someone who has left almost every workplace she
00:00:48.980 has ever entered um been forcibly removed and left it worse off than when she entered it 1.00
00:00:52.980 two women without workplaces weigh in on whether women are ruining the work can't confirm have
00:01:00.100 ruined workplaces okay so before i take you on a journey through uh larry summer's resume because
00:01:08.180 somehow that's relevant can you give us the high points on the great feminization discourse because
00:01:13.680 you originally texted me about this a couple weeks ago to be like yo are you up on this and i had no 0.92
00:01:18.640 fucking idea what you were talking about. Yeah, I feel like there are certain topics where
00:01:22.640 we can become interested in them, but sometimes we'll be like, no, actually, I think you should
00:01:27.240 do it. And so I read this discourse, and I was ranting about it on social media, and I was like,
00:01:32.120 I would be desperate to know what Katie would say about this. It feels very squarely in your
00:01:37.040 wheelhouse. So yeah, this woman, Helen Andrews, who is somehow an Ivy League graduate, made this
00:01:42.500 long essay argument in a relatively reputable site called Compact Magazine. And it was basically
00:01:50.040 arguing something that has been argued in the past, which is that the workforce has been
00:01:54.080 feminized and that wokeness, the concept of wokeness is inherently feminine and that by women
00:02:00.300 entering basically previously male institutions, they are weakening and eroding them. And if we
00:02:05.640 don't stop this, 100% of workforces are going to be women and the legal and the rule of law will 1.00
00:02:11.800 not survive as we know it. Yes, the famously sturdy rule of law. Okay, so first we are going 1.00
00:02:19.580 to do a close read of this op-ed that launched A Thousand Think Pieces. Because yes, this discourse
00:02:24.900 was technically kicked off when a woman named Helen Andrews published a piece in Compact
00:02:30.080 Magazine called The Great Feminization. Now, originally, she delivered this idea as a speech
00:02:37.220 at the National Conservatism Conference, NatCon.
00:02:41.360 And apparently it went so gangbusters
00:02:44.040 that she was like, rubs hands together.
00:02:47.140 Double down.
00:02:47.960 Time to memorialize this evidence-free hypothesis
00:02:50.700 in a populist magazine, baby.
00:02:53.320 So a little background on Helen Andrews.
00:02:55.060 I was surprised to learn that she's actually
00:02:56.660 the author of a book called Boomers,
00:02:59.060 The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom
00:03:01.240 and Delivered a Disaster.
00:03:03.280 Ezra Klein actually interviewed her
00:03:05.060 about boomers in 2021 on The Ezra Klein Show. 0.98
00:03:08.240 So she's been lurking around the periphery
00:03:11.520 of the opinion section at the paper of record
00:03:13.860 for a little while now.
00:03:14.960 But this piece really catapulted her
00:03:17.040 into the center of the rage machine online,
00:03:20.580 as intended, I would assume.
00:03:23.340 To borrow a caroism,
00:03:24.840 I'm going to Tarantino this article and say,
00:03:27.880 it was one of the most absurd and unserious pieces
00:03:31.020 of writing that I've read this year,
00:03:32.600 to the point that I was like, 0.98
00:03:33.620 is this even worth legitimizing with an episode and then i was like fuck it that's showbiz we're 0.90
00:03:40.660 gonna legitimize it and then you remember that we were living in an america where nursing is
00:03:45.140 no longer a professional degree and you were like maybe i should address it so the piece opens with
00:03:50.460 a story about one larry summers the former president of harvard university resigning sorry
00:03:58.120 sorry being canceled it's so timely due to a no confidence vote by the faculty of arts and
00:04:05.240 sciences following a supposedly off the record talk in which he expressed the view that differences
00:04:11.580 in aptitude and interest were to blame for gender disparities in the quote unquote hard sciences
00:04:18.660 so like in my notes i had this little comment to myself in the google doc that was like
00:04:23.160 what is Larry Summers doing now? What happened to this man after he was canceled? Do you know
00:04:28.840 the answer to this question, Caro? He was continuing to teach at Harvard until about
00:04:33.860 a week ago, right? Among other things. So according to Larry Summers's CV, which is a PDF linked on
00:04:42.360 his website, the next position that he held immediately following his post as president
00:04:47.920 of Harvard, was assistant to President Obama for economic policy and director of the National
00:04:55.160 Economic Council. Elsewhere, it was reported that he was immediately granted a university
00:05:00.360 professorship at Harvard and joined a hedge fund. And of course, you said this was timely. The other
00:05:06.140 fun tidbit here is that Larry Summers was in the news just this week because he and Epstein
00:05:11.500 apparently emailed extensively like pen pal status think boys going down in the dms
00:05:20.160 what's the chorus for canceled i've already forgotten every detail of that album good thing
00:05:25.360 i like my friends canceled nice something something that's good that's enough okay
00:05:31.600 just the one is fine she and scandal all right so i bring all this up to say right off the bat
00:05:38.220 The core anecdote of this piece, which attempts to prove the argument for the injustice of cancellation as ruining the careers of capital P, capital G, capital M, perfectly good men, doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, even in what Andrew chooses, as her singular exemplary case study.
00:05:58.160 Because the man in question literally just got a better job.
00:06:01.340 It's like failing up, but literally to the Oval Office of, like, the most popular president in modern history.
00:06:06.660 so the weird thing about this article is that she essentially admits outright immediately that she
00:06:15.460 is restating a theory that she read elsewhere and then links to that original blog post she's like
00:06:21.100 you know on 4chan which pinpoints this specific event in 2005 larry summers having to publicly
00:06:29.160 apologize for his comments and then getting a job in the white house afterward as the beginning of 0.98
00:06:34.340 quote, feminist hysteria replacing, quote, logic and reason in the, quote, American public discourse.
00:06:42.820 I'm going to let that, I'm just going to take a pause for us to just sit with that.
00:06:46.920 I know. I just had like 10 different responses flow through my head and I was like, all of those
00:06:51.120 are too mean. So 2005 is, according to this anonymous blog post that Andrews is essentially
00:06:57.220 lifting the core thesis of her argument from, the year that this feminist hysteria reached a
00:07:03.220 critical mass in culture and began meaningfully changing things. For the worse, if that wasn't 0.96
00:07:10.080 obvious. The original blog post uses the word hysteria 11 times. So right off the bat, can you
00:07:16.960 think of anything else that came into existence circa 2005?