Who is afraid of women at work? A feminist reading of the New York Times’ artefact ‘Did women/liberal feminism ruin the workplace?’

This review examines Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace, an opinion piece article (and its related video and transcript) produced by The New York Times in 2024.1 The artefact stages a debate between two conservative thinkers: Helen Andrews, who argues that the ‘feminization’ of institutions has driven out masculine virtues and fostered a damaging ‘wokeness’; and Leah Libresco Sargeant, who contends that liberal feminism fails by forcing women to conform to a workplace model designed for autonomous, unencumbered men, thereby treating them as ‘defective men’ and denying the dignity of human dependence. The artefact poses a deceptively simple question that frames feminism as a polarising force and women’s participation as organisational dysfunction. By staging a debate between constructed ‘sides’ of liberal and conservative feminism, it reduces feminism to a narrow conversation about political attitudes rather than a deep inquiry into the structures shaping gendered labour. The artefact asserts that ‘men and women are different’ and that liberal feminism failed by ‘pretending that the sexes are the same’, linking women’s presence to ‘wokeness’ and the breakdown of truth-seeking, as exemplified in its portrayal of #MeToo. Organisational change is explained through essentialised gender differences, male ‘warrior bands’ versus female ‘conflict-averse’ behaviour, treating feminism as a destabilising force rather than a body of theories and varied practices. In this review, we address not only this article but also similar anti-feminist media artefacts emerging transnationally (Daub and Donegan, 2025). Rather than confronting the limits of dominant feminist politics, such as coloniality, racism, heteronormativity and caste-neglect, among others, such artefacts collapse feminism into ‘wokeness’, allowing it to be dismissed while leaving unexamined the enduring problems of exploitation and intersectional violence in organisations. This review departs from conventional commentary by not only critiquing the artefact’s framing but also treating it as a site through which to perform feminist analysis itself. We ask what ‘problem’ about feminism and the workplace is constructed here and what histories of labour, race, caste and colonial power become invisible.