Claire Howorth
Kenneal had something to say!
Abigail Sylvor Greenberg
If Andrews was using “women in the workplace” as a route to talk about wokeness, Sargeant was using it to talk about abortion and reproduction.
I really liked Andrews’s explanation of what makes wokeness feminized: When Douthat asks her about the “essential nature” of wokeness, she says, “Let’s pick one flavor,” and then complains about how #MeToo brought about the “mandatory” belief of women.
Nothing more feminized than believing women!
Wisdom Iheanyichukwu
I feel like the question itself is a sort of violence, but also it just reveals this obsession with denouncing wokeness and placing blame on women for men facing the consequences of the wrong things they do that get written off as manly vices. A desire for the workplace to be copacetic for all parties involved is now seen as woke. Woke is bad. Women are bad. Woke ruins the workplace. Women cause woke, so women ruin the workplace.
Have women ruined the workplace? Have people ruined the Chicken Dance? A lot of inconsequential questions that don’t really need to be asked.
It’s interesting to focus on whether women ruin the workplace when women are many a time existing within the constraints of male-dominated spaces where men are acting out, which suggests an issue lies within the men, and not the women, of that space.
A multitude of the examples of how women ruin the workplace are just traits misattributed to femininity, while in reality they are not exclusively that, as women and men can behave in similar manners and fail at the same things. If the idea is that women are unfit to be in the workplace because it is “unnatural” for them, then I raise, it’s also unnatural for men. Women are not the only ones who find fault with the systems in place at work, but why are they the only ones being asked to divorce themselves from the workplace? Being restrained to a workplace for the majority of one’s week, being forced to prioritize work over one’s self and needs, is unnatural for humans in general. What we see is people being placed into situations and institutions where different levels of power are stripped from them, and these people then act out, or they don’t always behave in a manner conducive to everyone’s well-being. And so, rather than asking if women are ruining the workplace, we should be asking if the workplace is ruining the people. The workplace is unnatural; it is not a foundational aspect of human nature, so regardless of whoever dominated the space first or dominates it presently, we should be focusing on creating spaces that everyone can exist within in a copacetic manner.
