Competition, Civility, & the #Discourse: Designing Institutions for Humans with Mixed Motivational Orientations
Against panic about “feminization”: how pipeline, tasks, and norms actually shift work. And for modes, not morals: human organizations need challenge, support, and triage—without the gender war...
Against panic about “feminization”: how pipeline, tasks, and norms actually shift work. And for modes, not morals: human organizations need challenge, support, and triage—without the gender war frame. And context-switching is a needed skill: institutions should train to challenge to call forth extra effort without dismissal, for cooperation without saccharine evasion, and for candor without performative aggression…
The extremely sharp Chad Orzel is 100% on here:
Chad Orzel: Gender Preferences in Motivation <https://chadorzel.substack.com/p/kids-are-kids-and-gender-preferences>: ‘The other big thing making the rounds of the #discourse is this article about “feminization” from Helen Andrews. This is solidly in the deeply frustrating class of articles that have a bit of a valid point at their core, but wrap it up in enough culture-war shitposting to totally poison the topic. Megan McArdle, both in the WaPo and on the new Central Air podcast, and Matt Yglesias make a decent attempt at saying something sensible on the topic, but Andrews is so comically hyperbolic that it’s difficult to engage with…
He is right. The fight over “feminization” mistakes a design problem for a civilizational crisis. Build spaces that reward both hard challenge and collaborative care—then teach people to switch modes fast. Differences in average personality types between genders do exist; but within-gender variance swamps between. Moreover, panic doesn’t help except for those who want to be s***posters. Optimize institutions for complementary strengths, and separate content from tone to keep candor without harassment.
Chad’s selection from Megan:
Megan McArdle: <MY POLICY: NO LINK>: ‘Acknowledge the reality of male-female differences and remember that those differences are manageable…. Traits are… just more or less useful depending on the degree and the context. Extreme risk aversion is a splendid quality in a bank regulator, and a crippling handicap in an entrepreneur. It’s good that employers became more attuned to the feelings of their employees…. We don’t need to protect institutional integrity from the insufficiencies of women so much as craft institutions that maximize the complementary strengths of both men and women—while also minimizing our respective weaknesses…
My selection from Matt:
Matt Yglesias: Women’s professional rise is good, actually <https://www.slowboring.com/p/womens-professional-rise-is-good>: ‘Helen Andrews is spreading panic, not telling forbidden truths…. Andrews… claims that these workplace shifts… [are] “a potential threat to civilization”… in an aggressive, almost willfully anti-persuasive tone… designed to attract… woke scolds, so that Andrews’s fellow conservatives can complain that the left is in denial about basic facts of human biology….
But this is a serious topic that deserves better than sloppy partisan demagoguery…. Andrews opens… recounting… Larry Summers’s defenestration… for speculating that gender parity in hard sciences would never be achieved due to sex differences in interests and capabilities…. Summers was treated shabbily…. However, she herself is completely blind to the implication that women have come to dominate in… fields… [that] play into… [their] strengths…. Gender gaps in specific facets of personality are not really all that large, but the gender gaps in aggregate personality are pretty big.… Like what happens with faces…. People… reliably identify male versus female… but if you zoom in on just a nose or just eyes or just a chin, it’s much harder to tell…. There’s plenty of room for overlap on individual features. But there isn’t a lot of overlap in the overall gestalt…. I personally find the rise of more agreeable office culture to be a little annoying in some respects, but I’m glad about the decline of in-office screaming.
Beyond the basic analytic unseriousness, though, Andrews’s argument lacks the courage of her convictions. She tells us that the existence of female professors, journalists, lawyers, and judges is an existential threat to civilization, then claims she has no desire to take any opportunities away from anyone—she just wants to curb the bad employment-discrimination policies…. But there’s just no reason to believe women’s prominence in these roles has anything to do with H.R. or Title VII…. The heft of Andrews’s piece comes from the prospect of widespread de-feminization, which would require massive cultural change and the rebirth of an incredibly oppressive and constraining set of social norms. And neither she nor her allies are willing to actually make the case for it, because it would be horrifying…
And Chad has his take on motivation-via-competition:
Chad Orzel: Gender Preferences in Motivation <https://chadorzel.substack.com/p/kids-are-kids-and-gender-preferences>: ‘With respect to motivation through competition… I’ll more or less stand by my summary take from [2022]:… There are some people who are powerfully motivated by… competition and striving… and others who are not. I don’t think that [those]… who speak positively of being pushed hard… are confused or deluded—I take them at their word… I’ve felt the same way at times…. And on the flip side, I find a lot of attempts to motivate people in ways that are meant to be communal and cooperative to be de-motivating… [and] check out…. So, I react negatively to the idea of de-emphasizing competition and peak performance as a goal because that… [is] saying that an entire personality type is illegitimate….
Personality types are somewhat correlated with gender… which ties into the organizational structure thing… [but] both ways of motivation are valid. We need… spaces… communal and collaborative and spaces where open and direct competition is the norm… [and] for people to self-organize into the appropriate one for them without denouncing the other as a Threat to Civilization. Unfortunately, Andrews’s piece and much of the resulting #discourse is very much Not Helping…
What do I think? I have many thoughts. Briefly, Chad is right. But, also, it is very very important—and very difficult—to teach people that they need to context-switch. And it is also very very important—and very difficult—to teach people that a challenge and a demand that they excel and go beyond their previous personal best is often intended to be helpful, and that a demand that they accommodate and validate the thoughts and feelings of others is rarely a dismissal of the value of their individual contributions.
I did figure out something back around 1990. I figured out there were three modes I could pick for how to try to engage whenever I found myself as a lead interlocutor with the presenter at an academic seminar:
This is someone who will respond well to being challenged as hard as possible—who will respond best to being interrupted and asked the hardest possible questions, which will lead them to shine…
This is someone who will respond best to support and community appreciation—comments should express appreciation, and build on the argument being made either to fill in elisions that may have led it to fail to register with a good chunk of the audience or to note important and interesting extensions that the presentation is missing…
This is someone who is not even wrong—we need to get together to get the discussion off of the thread they are pursuing and onto an exploration of what might really be going on as fast as possible…
And which of those types one is in calls for rapid and complete context-switching in order to maximize the academic and educational benefits of the exercise. And I do semi-frequently find myself in history or sociology seminars that are of type (2) when they would be much more interesting for us in the audience and for the speaker if we shifted to type (1). And I do frequently find myself in economics seminars of type (1)—especially with young speakers—where those who are the principal interlocutors ought to wake up, smell the coffee, and shift to type (2). And they don’t. And I am okay with calling that failure “toxic masculinity”. And I do sometimes find myself in economics seminars where some claque in the audience shifts it from type (1) or (2) into a very dysfunctional type (3). And I am very much not okay with not calling that “toxic masculinity”.
And I have found myself in sociology and history seminars of type (2) that really ought to be type (3). That does no favors to the audience or, in the long run, to the speaker: it is not fair to give them feedback that pushes them to keep going down the wrong analytical road, and for audiences that genuinely believe that they are going down the wrong analytical road not to make that clear—well, I am okay with calling that “toxic femininity”.
And I will say that someone who can only operate in mode (1), or only in mode (2), or, the Holy One Who Is forbid!, mode (3) is not someone who is likely in the long run to be of value in any but the weirdest of organizations.
Within economics M.A. and Ph.D. programs, there is a problem: People who function well in mode two (2) are going, during their careers, to find themselves in a lot of situations of mode (1) and some of mode (3). We would not do our educational job if we did not provide them with practice in figuring out how to deal with such. Yet it it hard to provide such practice without coming across to them as an asshole. Conversely, we get a bunch of people coming in who cannot and do not function in mode (2) at all. And figuring out how to persuade them that this is not a good way to be is almost impossible—they have been strongly rewarded for always being hypercompetitive for their whole life so far, after all.
I think this latter is, right now, a bigger problem than the former. Economics now is, I think, a discipline that is still too hypercompetitive.
To summarize: Gender‑coded narratives obscure real drivers of change: expanded education pipelines, sectoral task demands, and the measurable productivity drain from harassment and incivility. In seminar life, three modes dominate—challenge, support, and triage—and the core skill is rapid switching to match speaker and context. Economics overweights competition; history and sociology sometimes under‑triage.
I could make all the other obvious points that Andrews does not:
The civilization thesis overreaches: Historical cancel cultures were often male-led; the pressing task is optimizing mixed‑gender institutions to harness complementary strengths, not reversing inclusion.
Selection, not quotas: Women’s surge into professions is primarily explained by expanded education pipelines, not by legal compulsion or HR numerics.
Pipeline trumps polemic: Claims that civil rights law “forces” parity are falsified by persistent underrepresentation in many firms and top roles; the pipeline changes are doing most of the work.
Sectoral feminization follows task content: Fields rich in interpersonal interaction, communication, and care attract more women; code-dense, low-contact roles remain male‑skewed; we do not know the extent to which this is more than the consequence of the cultural overlay on top of biology.
Harassment is a productivity drain: Gender harassment is widespread and pushes talent out, and hypercompetiveness is perceived as harassment even when it is not so intended; so reducing incivility is a growth strategy as much as an equity goal.
Norm shifts cut conflict costs: Moving from “yelling cultures” to civility lowers cognitive distraction and error rates in complex organizations.
Civility vs. candor is a design problem: Institutions can preserve open debate while dampening performative aggression by training conflict competence and separating content from tone.
I could make them all at length. But this is more than long enough as-is.
Having worked at an institution that hires the gold medallists in economics from around the world, I can assure you it is not effective to have a team of people who all think they are the smartest.
Mode 1 aggression in Economics is ridiculous. I've seen it not only in seminars, but in business. It was counterproductive. But to your wisdom, read how to best interact with the individual, not the cohort.
Likewise, I've seen people who were ridiculous risk takers in business. The people weren't traders, but acted like they were. The problem wasn't that they took risks, it is that they doubled and tripled down as everything went wrong. They never had a stop loss or exit strategy because that would admit failure. Worse, they weren't making trades, but investments. It was expensive. Too often, high risk appetite is a cover story for vanity. Male aggression is just another cover story.