Did feminization kill progress?
No.
Are women inherently opposed to progress and technology? Are they responsible for declining productivity and stagnant economic growth?
I first started paying attention to these questions when I heard technologist Peter Thiel on Joe Rogan’s podcast hypothesizing that one reason for the recent “slowdown in tech” was we had become “a more feminized, risk averse society.” Thiel is a Silicon Valley tastemaker whose intellectual influence stretches all the way to the White House.
Then, more recently, Thiel was interviewed by The Spectator and expanded on this view, arguing that the U.S. had become a more risk averse society, in part due to feminization:
“You had these high-testosterone men that like to push buttons, or the physicists that like to build bigger bombs,” Thiel said. “If we replace the eccentric male scientists with less talented DEI people, that sounds like a bug, but maybe it’s a feature. We’re going to end up with this really lame world where nothing happens, but it’s maybe harder for it to blow up.”
People like Thiel tend to phrase this argument carefully in public outlets, but in more right-wing outlets, the subtext becomes text and abstract theorizing about feminization and progress becomes straightforward claims that women are the cause of The Great Stagnation:
Aporia Magazine, a fringe magazine founded by people almost monomaniacally obsessed with between-group genetic differences, published an essay last year arguing that “the biggest political sex difference is in progress orientation.” That is, because of “psychological differences between the sexes,” increasing numbers of women in positions of power would inexorably lead to society becoming “more anti-progress.”
It’s not just open anti-feminists and right-wing political theorists who have begun to question whether women’s progress has cost us a dynamic, thriving, economy. Even observers within the Progress Studies1 space have pondered this dynamic: Mathematician and science writer Sarah Constantin noted that it is a “common lament” that the progress community is very masculine and that “women are underrepresented among enthusiasts of markets and technology.”
It seems, on face, unlikely that unleashing the productive capacity of more than half the country is responsible for the U.S.’ economic and technological stagnation, but feminization theorists consistently point to gender gaps in support for technologies like nuclear, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and, recently, self-driving cars as proof for their thesis.
These are a cherrypicked set of issues that don’t necessarily illuminate how women—or people in general—feel about technology. Nuclear in particular, which is where most of the public opinion data on the tech gender gap comes from, has suffered from bad PR for decades. And some data indicates that both men and women have serious safety concerns with the technology—that just doesn’t seem to be what’s driving different views on the technology. And with self-driving cars, as I’ve written before, there’s evidence that women are more supportive of the technology in the West, where there has been more exposure.
But again, these are a highly selected sample of questions, and on a broad array of technological innovations, there simply isn’t very much polling.
So, we decided to do it ourselves.
Women like–and dislike–technology just as much as men
The Argument polled 3,003 registered U.S. voters from Feb. 4-10, 20262. For each technology we polled, we asked respondents to tell us whether their widespread use would be a positive or negative thing for society overall. Across a broad range of technologies, we observe a negligible gender gap.
