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“Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”
Betrayed by The New York Times
TL; DR: After 30 years as a NYT subscriber, I felt betrayed when the paper asked “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” The question itself is the violence—it treats women’s equality as debatable. The NYT platformed two women who both blame women: one says we ruin institutions with feminine vices, the other says we’re naturally dependent caregivers needing special accommodation. Neither questions why workplaces were designed around men who had wives doing all the invisible labor. Women are trained from birth to stay small. By 40, we’re exhausted from proving ourselves—then perimenopause hits and medicine abandons us too. This isn’t accidental; it’s happening as DEI is dismantled nationwide. I’m done defending women’s right to exist in professional spaces. After three decades trusting the Times, I now see my full humanity is still up for debate—and I’m reconsidering my subscription.
I landed at JFK thirty years ago. Within days, I had a New York Times subscription.
It wasn’t just a newspaper. It was my introduction to American discourse, my daily education in how this country thought about itself, my compass for understanding the culture I’d chosen to join. When I moved to the West Coast, the Times came with me. Through every move, every life transition, every version of myself, Wall Street VP, medical student, mother, doctor, the Times was there.
Until last week, when it asked: “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?”
They softened it later to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” as if the modifier made it acceptable. It doesn’t. The question itself is the wound.
When exactly did “truth-seeking” come to mean reanimating old suspicions about women and calling it intellectual courage?
Because that’s what happened here. The New York Times didn’t uncover a scandal or break news. They didn’t investigate workplace dysfunction or examine why institutions fail. They asked whether women, half the human population, might be the problem.
And they called it a conversation.
But let’s be precise about what kind of conversation this is.
Isn’t it strange that we keep pretending we’re having a debate about merit, when so often what we’re doing is testing how much misogyny can be reintroduced into public life under the cover of conversation?
Because that’s exactly what’s happening. We’re not debating ideas. We’re negotiating how much contempt for women can be reintroduced if we dress it up as discourse. If we add a question mark. As long as we platform women to deliver the message.
If we truly believe meritocracy is real, wouldn’t the genuinely brave headline be: “Did Our Systems Ruin Merit, and Then Blame Women for the Wreckage?”
But that question would require examining power. It would require looking at who designed these systems, who they were designed to serve, and who profits from their dysfunction.
It’s so much easier to ask if women ruined things.
What happens inside companies the morning after a headline like this?
Here’s exactly what happens: Hiring managers feel newly licensed to interpret a woman’s assertiveness as cultural corrosion. Promotion committees file the article away as another quiet reason to pass on a qualified woman for a stretch role. The women already exhausted by proving and re-proving their competence must now manage an ambient doubt that wasn’t there last week.
The New York Times just gave every bias permission to speak a little louder.
Does the ambient contempt remain rhetorical, or does it metastasize into action?
It metastasizes.
Into hiring decisions and promotion committees, into who gets staffed on high-visibility projects and who gets stuck on the “women’s initiatives,” into who gets credit when ideas succeed and who gets blamed when bets fail, into who gets air cover, second chances, stretch assignments, into who advances and who leaves.
Two Women, One Devastating Premise
The podcast featured two conservative writers, Helen Andrews and Leah Libresco Sargeant. Their positions differ, but what they share is more damaging than where they diverge: both accept the premise that women are the problem to be solved.
Helen Andrews: Women Destroy Institutions
Andrews believes women ruin institutions by their very presence. She argues that “female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” When asked about “toxic femininity,” she listed gossip, inability to handle conflict directly, aversion to directness, all the stereotypes that have been used to exclude women from power for centuries.
But it gets worse.
Andrews defended a shipyard discrimination case where a woman sued over a hostile work environment. The “hostile environment” included pornographic images plastered on walls, sexist graffiti, and a male coworker who physically thrust his leg between hers. Andrews insisted the woman was wrong to sue. That men need “fratty” things to “build the bonds of brotherhood.” That women shouldn’t question it.
Sexual harassment as team building. That’s her argument.
And when directly asked to name a single female virtue, just one positive thing women bring to institutions, Andrews dismissed the question itself as “a little bit feminine, honestly, to focus on my likes and dislikes.”
She couldn’t name one. Not one.
This is what internalized misogyny looks like in its most concentrated form: a woman who has climbed the ladder by distinguishing herself from other women, who proves her worth by denigrating theirs, who achieves proximity to male power by throwing the rest of us under the bus.
Leah Libresco Sargeant: Women Are Built For Dependence
Sargeant takes a different approach, one that sounds compassionate on its surface. She argues that women are fundamentally built for dependence, caregiving, and relationality. That we are embodied creatures with needs, pregnancy, breastfeeding, caregiving responsibilities, that men simply don’t have. She claims liberal feminism failed women by forcing us to “suppress our nature and fit into workplaces and social systems made for men.”
Her solution? Workplaces should accommodate women’s essential nature as caregivers. We should celebrate women’s dependence rather than demanding they perform independence. We should build systems around the reality that women are the ones who get pregnant, who nurse babies, who do the majority of caregiving.
She describes workplaces that reward “forgoing sleep as proof of commitment” and praise women for “suppressing their grief over being kept apart from their babies” as denying “basic biological reality.” She’s not wrong about that critique.
But here’s where her argument collapses into something insidious.
Sargeant argues that because women are naturally dependent and oriented toward caregiving, we need special accommodations to participate in professional life. She takes specific biological realities, pregnancy, nursing, menopause, and extrapolates them into an essential female nature. She argues that because women get pregnant and go through menopause, we are fundamentally oriented toward dependence and caring, more than having successful professional careers. That our nature is caregiving, not achieving.
Do you see the trap?
The Harm In Both Positions
Andrews says women ruin institutions with our feminine vices. Sargeant says women can’t thrive in institutions unless those institutions accommodate our feminine nature.
Neither asks the fundamental question: Why is caregiving considered feminine? Why is dependence gendered? Why are the qualities we associate with women, empathy, relationality, caregiving, devalued in professional spaces while the qualities we associate with men, autonomy, aggression, competition, are rewarded?
Neither questions the system. Both question women.
And here’s the other cost no one wants to discuss: By gendering caregiving as feminine and treating emotional intelligence as weakness, we’ve created generations of emotionally stunted men. Men who weren’t taught to identify their feelings, let alone express them. Men who don’t know how to ask for help. Men who become isolated, disconnected, desperate.
Look at the suicide rates. Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Not because men are naturally prone to it, but because we’ve taught them that vulnerability is feminine, that needing others is weakness, that emotional literacy is for women.
When we gender caregiving and emotional capacity as feminine, we don’t just trap women. We cripple men. We deny them the very skills that make life survivable, the ability to connect, to care, to be cared for, to recognize when they’re struggling and reach out for help.
When an outlet stages a clash between a woman who recycles misogynistic tropes and another whose frame is misaligned with the lived realities of most working women, is that balance, or is it a way to launder skepticism about women through women’s mouths?
It’s laundering.
This is how institutional power perpetuates itself in 2025. Not through explicit discrimination, but through framing. By treating women’s full humanity as a hypothesis to be tested. By platforming women to validate suspicion about other women. By calling it intellectual courage when it’s just recycled contempt.
Both Andrews and Sargeant accept the gendered division of human capacities. Andrews wants to preserve masculine spaces free from feminine softness. Sargeant wants to celebrate women’s caregiving nature. Neither questions why we carved up human capacities along gender lines in the first place. Neither asks what we lose, what both men and women lose, when we pretend that emotional intelligence, caregiving, and interdependence are female traits rather than human necessities.
Making the distinction clear
Let me be precise here, because this distinction is critical. Yes, some biological realities are sex-specific. Pregnancy is real. Menopause is real. These are natural life stages that require accommodation, just like pregnancy requires accommodation. A workplace that doesn’t account for menopause is as broken as one that doesn’t account for pregnancy. Both are realities of having a female body. Both require support.
But here’s what Sargeant does: she takes these specific biological realities, pregnancy, nursing, menopause, and extrapolates them into an essential female nature.
That’s the leap. And it’s wrong.
Pregnancy doesn’t make women dependent. It makes them pregnant.
Menopause doesn’t make me essentially dependent. It makes me a woman going through a natural transition that requires treatment and accommodation.
Women may be natural nurturers. That’s not a weakness, it’s a strength. But here’s what society does with that strength: it uses it to trap women.
Women have traditionally done most caregiving work not just because we might be naturally inclined toward it, but because men haven’t been expected to develop those capacities. Because caregiving work has been devalued. Because “she’s naturally better at it” became the excuse for “he doesn’t have to do it.” Because society structured itself so that women had no choice. And then, after women had been doing this work for generations, it was retroactively justified as our “nature”, as if biology explained social arrangement.
The problem isn’t women’s nurturing capacity. The problem is using that capacity to justify an unfair distribution of labor, to penalize women professionally for doing care work, and to excuse men from developing their own caregiving capabilities.
Being good at something doesn’t mean you should do all of it, do it for free, or sacrifice your career for it.
Men are just as capable of caregiving. They’re just as dependent on others. They’ve just had women shouldering that work for them.
The workplace should accommodate menopause the same way it accommodates pregnancy, because bodies are real and these transitions matter. But accommodating menopause doesn’t mean accepting that women are “naturally” different in temperament, capability, or professional orientation.
The Lie They’re Selling
Here’s what both women miss, what the New York Times refused to examine, what the entire frame obscures:
The “ideal worker” they reference, the one who never gets pregnant, never needs to leave for a sick child, never requires accommodation for bodily needs, wasn’t most men. He was a very specific man: white, affluent, married, with a wife who had no choice but to manage every other aspect of human existence so he could pretend to be pure productivity.
That worker was never autonomous. He was subsidized.
His “independence” was an accounting trick that disappeared women’s labor from the ledger.
Every meal he didn’t cook. Every child he didn’t raise. Every aging parent he didn’t care for. Every doctor’s appointment he didn’t schedule. Every birthday party he didn’t plan. Every emotional crisis he didn’t manage. Every household decision he didn’t make.
That was all work. It was just unpaid, invisible, and assigned to women.
And then we built workplace norms around his “performance”, as if working 80-hour weeks was a sign of commitment rather than evidence that someone else was handling his life.
What Happened When Women Entered the Workforce
When women entered the workforce, we didn’t “feminize” institutions or “fail to adapt.” We exposed a lie.
The workplace was never designed for humans. It was designed to extract maximum labor by externalizing every human need onto women’s unpaid work at home.
We revealed that “professional culture” wasn’t neutral. It was the culture of people who had wives.
And here’s the deeper problem: This system didn’t just fail women. It failed most men too.
Working-class men couldn’t perform this fiction; their wives had to work. Men of color couldn’t access it, workplace discrimination ensured that. Single men, divorced men, gay men, the system didn’t serve them either.
The “ideal worker” was always a myth. But it was a useful myth, because it justified paying women less (they’re not ideal workers), promoting women more slowly (they’re not committed), and building systems that treated human needs as inconveniences rather than realities.
The Real Solution
The workplace doesn’t need to accommodate women. The workplace needs to stop being designed around the fiction of the autonomous male who was never autonomous in the first place.
This isn’t about making workplaces “feminine.” It’s about making them human.
Designing systems that acknowledge people have bodies that get sick, children who need care, parents who age, energy that depletes, limits that matter.
Men need this too. They just don’t know it yet because women are still doing the invisible labor that makes their “ideal worker” performance possible.
If we truly believe meritocracy is real, wouldn’t the genuinely brave headline be: “Did Our Systems Ruin Merit, and Then Blame Women for the Wreckage?”
But that question would require examining who designed these systems, who they were designed to serve, and who profits from keeping them broken.
The question isn’t whether women ruined the workplace by introducing human needs into it.
The question is: Why did we ever accept workplaces designed to deny that human needs existed?
The Political Moment We’re In
Is it really an accident that this headline arrives in a political moment where a sitting president has moved to erase DEI from the federal vocabulary, where states are dismantling equity programs, where school boards and legislatures are policing what can be said about history and identity?
No. This is coordinated.
Not conspiracy, coordination. A cultural permission structure being rebuilt brick by brick.
When corporations scrap DEI with a triumphant flourish, are they protecting merit or comfort?
They’re protecting comfort. And the New York Times just handed them intellectual cover to do it.
Because now there’s a question on the table: Did women ruin the workplace? Maybe diversity wasn’t working after all. Maybe we moved too fast. Maybe merit means what it meant in 1985, before women and people of color demanded to be evaluated on actual performance rather than cultural fit.
When the powerful tell you to stop asking for equality, it’s because you don’t have it yet. The backlash itself proves the inequality persists.
At what point does curiosity without duty to truth become complicity?
The Times will claim they’re just asking questions. That they’re exploring difficult topics. That intellectual discourse requires discomfort.
Fine. Then answer this:
If you are an editor, would you publish a headline that tested how far we can rehabilitate contempt for men as a class? If not, what made this one feel printable?
The answer is obvious. Some questions are bad faith. Some questions cause harm by their asking. Some questions shouldn’t be platformed not because we’re afraid of ideas, but because the question itself is the violence.
Since when is intellectual seriousness measured by the ability to survive a loaded question rather than by the discipline to reject one?
That’s what courage looks like. Not asking provocative questions. Not “exploring difficult ideas.” But having the discipline to say: This frame is wrong. This question is bad faith. This premise harms half our readers. We’re not doing this.
That’s editorial courage. Everything else is just click
The Cost
We tell girls from birth that they can be anything. Then we spend their entire lives teaching them they can’t.
Watch what happens.
A girl raises her hand too much in class, she’s bossy. She negotiates her first salary, she’s demanding. She advocates for her ideas in a meeting, she’s aggressive. She gets promoted, she’s lucky, or she slept her way there, or she’s the diversity hire. She has a baby, she’s not serious about her career. She doesn’t have a baby, she’s cold, unnatural, selfish.
At every single stage, the message is clear: You don’t belong. You’re asking for too much. You should be grateful for what you have.
Stay small, stay quiet, know your place.
And then we act shocked when women leave.
The Entire Ladder Is Broken
We call it the “broken rung”, that first step up to management where women fall off the ladder at disproportionate rates.
But it’s not one broken rung. The entire ladder is rigged.
It’s been rigged since we were children watching our mothers do two jobs while our fathers did one. Since we were teenagers learning that our worth was tied to how we looked, not what we knew. Since we were young professionals watching senior women get penalized for the same behaviors that got men promoted.
By the time a woman reaches her forties, when she should be ascending to senior leadership, she’s exhausted.
Not because she can’t do the work. Because she’s spent twenty years proving she can. Twenty years managing everyone else’s doubt. Twenty years watching less qualified men get promoted faster. Twenty years doing the invisible labor that makes everyone else’s success possible.
And then her body betrays her.
Perimenopause hits. Her brain stops working the way it used to. She can’t sleep. She can’t focus. She can’t remember. And when she goes to the doctor?
“It’s just stress. Welcome to your forties. Have you tried yoga?”
I see these women in my practice. Brilliant, accomplished, powerful women who think they’re losing their minds.
They’re not losing their minds. They’re losing the fight against a system designed to fail them at every turn.
And instead of treating them, medicine tells them to accept it. To be graceful about their exit. To make room for the next generation of men.
What Is the Long-Term Cost to A Society That Repeatedly Makes Women Defend Their Right to Exist Inside Its Core Institutions?
I can tell you the cost.
It’s the innovation we didn’t build because women were too exhausted from proving their right to be in the room.
It’s the leadership we don’t have because women left at exactly the moment they would have ascended.
It’s the solutions we never found because the agenda was hijacked by yet another debate about whether women belong.
It’s the mothers who can’t explain to their daughters why the world is still like this.
It’s the daughters who stop dreaming big because they’ve already learned the cost of ambition.
It’s the sons who grow up thinking women are less capable because that’s what every system around them demonstrates.
The Generational Damage
The cost compounds across generations.
We’re not just losing the women who leave now. We’re losing the girls who are watching them leave and learning that this is what happens when women try.
The girls who stop raising their hands in third grade. The women who don’t apply for promotions because they’ve seen what happens to women who do. The executives who leave at forty-five because their bodies won’t cooperate and their doctors won’t help. The brilliant minds we never hear from because they were exhausted from proving themselves before they ever got the chance to lead.
The cost is incalculable.
And the New York Times just added to it.
Because every time a major institution asks, “Did women ruin the workplace?” they’re sending a message to every girl, every young woman, every professional woman:
Your belonging is conditional. Your success is suspicious. Your presence is still on trial.
And somewhere, a girl is learning that lesson again.
Why This Feels Like Betrayal
For thirty years, I trusted the Times to help me understand America. I trusted them to ask the right questions, even when the answers were uncomfortable. I trusted them to use their power responsibly.
That trust is broken.
Not because they published conservative viewpoints or explored difficult questions about gender and work.
But because they treated women’s equality as a hypothesis to be tested rather than a principle to be defended.
Because they platformed arguments that women should accept sexual harassment as “fratty fun” and that women who demand respect are ruining male bonding.
Because they couldn’t imagine asking “Did workplaces fail women?” instead of “Did women fail workplaces?”
Why Do We Keep Telling Women to Toughen Up To Hostile Frames Rather Than Insisting That Powerful Institutions Practice Basic Editorial Ethics?
The framing is the harm. The question is the answer.
And my paper, the institution I trusted to help me understand this country, just told me that after thirty years, three decades of loyalty, my full humanity is still up for debate.
Who Profits?
Who profits when the baseline of women’s belonging is forever up for debate?
Not women. We lose career momentum every time we have to re-litigate our right to exist in professional space. We lose cognitive bandwidth. We lose years.
Not companies. They lose talent, innovation, and the ability to build meritocratic systems because they’re too busy managing the backlash to women’s presence.
Not society. We lose the contributions of half the population.
So, who profits?
The people who benefit from the status quo. The people who never had to prove they belonged. The people whose comfort matters more than others’ dignity. The people who would rather blow up the system than share power.
And apparently, the New York Times’ advertising revenue.
My Answer
I’m done answering this question.
I’m done explaining why women deserve to work. Why we deserve equal pay. Why sexual harassment is unacceptable. Why our bodies don’t disqualify us from leadership. Why asking for equity isn’t asking for special treatment.
I’m done defending my right to exist in rooms men built to exclude me.
The New York Times asked if women ruined the workplace.
Here’s my question: How many more decades will women waste proving we belong?
Thirty years ago, I arrived at JFK believing I’d found a country that valued women’s voices. I subscribed to the New York Times believing I’d found an institution that would help me understand that country.
I was wrong on both counts.
The question isn’t whether women ruined the workplace.
The question is whether we’ll finally stop consenting to institutions that export their contempt for us as if it were intellectual courage.
I know my answer.
The Times just helped me find it.
About the Author:
Dr. Manna Semby, ND
Functional Medicine Practitioner & Wellness Expert
Dr. Manna Semby, ND, IFMCP, MSCP, is a naturopathic and functional medicine doctor based in San Diego, California. She is the only doctor in the San Diego area who is both a Menopause Society Certified Practitioner and certified in the ReCODE 2.0 Protocol for preventing and reversing Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. She is also is a MoCA certified administrator. With over ten years in medicine, Dr. Manna has helped many women reverse early stages of cognitive decline through comprehensive brain, bone, metabolic, and midlife hormone medical care. She draws on years of clinical training and ongoing professional development to translate complex medical insights into practical, real-world precision medicine guidance.
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