Overproduction of Female Elites
Discussion
From an interview of Mary Harrington by N.S. Lyons:
- N.S. L: I was excited to see your essay in the latest issue of The Critic arguing, rather boldly, that much of the cultural (and political?) upheaval we are seeing today can be explained as the result of the overproduction of female elites (around 60% of US college students are female, with an even higher ratio in elite institutions). The political scientist Peter Turchin and others have argued that too many elites competing with each other to retain their class status leads to societal instability and even state collapse, but what does the (largely unprecedented) female character of the new Western elite have to do with it, in particular, in your view?
MH: In that essay I argued that the particular character of our emerging intra-elite conflict is historically unprecedented, because it’s heavily female. America has been producing more female than male graduates since the 1970s, and the same has been true in Britain since the 1990s. The imbalance might be relatively slight (though it's grown less so: 60/40 female to male at some elite US colleges now) but over the decades it compounds. The consequence has been, as numerous articles are now pointing out, an increasingly female-skewed ruling class.
I put this together with Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction, and Joyce Benenson’s research on female-typical aggression, to suggest that much of what looks like ideological conflict within institutions can plausibly be read as a conflict for increasingly scarce resources conducted in the female key. Whereas men tend to be more direct in their aggression, women typically compete indirectly via tactics such as hidden hierarchies, mob hostility, or conflict disguised as moral condemnation or concern for the group. Seen through that filter, it’s much easier to explain why – for example – one person is forced to resign for “historic tweets” while another weathers the storm: if you assume that in each case it's mostly about office politics, it all makes a great deal more sense.
I tried to make it clear that the jury’s out for me as to whether this is better or worse than the more violent sequelae Turchin describes in historic cases of elite overproduction. Either way, given that the structural conditions remain in place – women are more overrepresented than ever among college graduates since the pandemic – we can anticipate seeing it escalate over coming years and decades."
(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/mary-harrington-on-female-elites?)