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

Framing feminism: Binaries, essentialisms and conflations

Early in the artefact, a speaker defines ‘wokeness’ as an overextension of progressive politics and then invokes the #MeToo movement as political chaos. This move collapses anti-harassment activism, racial justice struggles and feminist critique into a single category of excess. Feminism and wokeness become interchangeable forces destabilising the ‘rational-neutral’ workplace (Acker, 1990). For Andrews, feminist gains (‘feminization’) directly cause a loss of ‘neutrality and rule of law’, exemplified by her critique of #MeToo procedures as replacing due process with emotional belief. For Sargeant, liberal feminism’s flaw is forcing women into a ‘male’ template of the ‘autonomous’ worker. Both frames evade questions of power, resource distribution and historical exclusion.

This rhetorical containment depends on constructing ‘women’ as singular and universal category, evident in Andrews’s reliance on evolutionary psychology (‘warriors and worriers’) to posit biologically determined group behaviours. Such bio-essentialism erases intersecting social relations, narrowing debate through binary containments into ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions. In doing so, the artefact treats patriarchy as a monolithic, universal condition rather than as situated relations of gendered power co-constituted through race, class, caste and colonial power (Dixit, 2026). Such arguments align closely with what decolonial scholars (Yousfi, 2021) identify as a recurring pattern in Euro-American discourse, which performs a superficial engagement with a narrow, white, and Western imagination of feminism while wholly disavowing transnational and subaltern histories of feminist struggle.

Despite their differing diagnoses – Andrews blaming ‘feminization’, Sargeant critiquing ‘autonomy’ – their arguments converge on core conservative premises: suspicion of the ‘unnecessary politicization’ (lamented as ‘wokeness’), denial of structural reform in favour of personal choice, cultural change or legal rollback, and heteronormative assumptions naturalising gender difference within a reproductive, familial frame.

Underpinning this is a shared narrative of male devaluation, whether of masculine virtues in the workplace or the protective role in the family. In Andrews’s telling women emerge as simultaneously fragile and dangerous: ‘irrational and unreasonable’ subjects whose complaining makes ‘any frank conversation with them dangerous and impossible’ – a dynamic she attributes to anti-discrimination laws. This portrayal crystallises the shared belief that laws and norms are now biased against men, punishing ‘male vices’ while empowering ‘female’ ones. This artefact aims not to interrogate feminism, but to rehearse a debate, within conservatism, about managing gender relations.

Black and Dalit feminism: Situating the myth of universal women

The universal ‘woman’ imagined by the artefact has long been challenged by Black and Dalit feminist thinkers revealing gender as inseparable from race, caste, class and labour. These traditions fundamentally challenge the premise that the workplace was ever a neutral arena disrupted by women’s entry, demonstrating it has always been built upon racialised, caste-bound and gendered divisions of labour. When the artefact frames feminist intervention as ‘disorder’, it enacts what feminists have identified as a discursive reversal: those who name harm are cast as harmful.

These genealogies expose what the artefact’s universalising frame erases: the structural differences shaped by caste, race, class and migration status that decolonial (Khader, 2020), Dalit (Pan, 2019) and Black (Nkomo and Naya, 2025) feminist scholars foreground. This erasure upholds an ‘upper’ caste, upper-class, racially and colonially privileged frame as the implicit standard of workplace belonging. This limitation is replicated when Sargeant challenges the ‘autonomous worker’ model by centering dependence, her proposed solution being – ‘choosing’ workplaces compatible with one’s ‘life situation’ (e.g., don’t work for SpaceX). Such solutions privatise the issue, leaving unchallenged the racialised structures that exploit reproductive and care labour.

A decolonial feminist reading: Whose feminism is being mobilised

Decolonial feminism asks who gets to speak as the representative of feminism and which genealogies are centred or erased (Khader, 2020). The artefact constructs and then derides a caricature of feminism, one in which the workplace is imagined as a ‘neutral’ space that women disrupt, thereby, ruining ‘neutral institutions’, ‘pillars of civilization’, ‘post-industrial economy’ and ‘male/female differences’. This caricature obscures the patriarchal structures that define the ‘ideal worker’ as male, while erasing migrant women’s labour in sustaining that supposedly ‘neutral’ workplace.

The artefact’s nostalgia for an orderly past obscures how gendered-racialised labour is entangled with coloniality and racial capitalism (Abdallah et al., 2025). The question ‘Did women ruin the workplace?’ presupposes a workplace not already structured through hierarchy, dispossession and inequality. A decolonial reading instead asks: which workplaces, and which women? Whose labour sustains the modern economy, and whose disruptions are feared? Such questions recall that feminist movements in the Global South have long contested violence, exploitation and the racial ordering of work (Tamale, 2022). The artefact’s framing, by contrast, reproduces a narrow Western script in which equality is imagined as entry into pre-existing structures rather than their transformation.

Conclusion

The New York Times artefact matters less for what it says about feminism than for how it organises the terms of debate. Rather than critiquing feminism in ways that might expose its hierarchies or complicity, the artefact collapses feminism into ‘wokeness’ and repositions it as a source of organisational chaos. In doing so, it misrepresents feminist struggle, and ignores the enduring realities of exploitation and precarity in workplaces – realities that Dalit, Black and decolonial feminisms have long worked to name and contest. The artefact shows how institutions deflect structural critique by turning it into rhetoric, demonstrating why organisational studies must take seriously the histories and geographies of labour erased not only in corporate policy, but in the public imagination of organisations and organisational lives.

To read such artefacts through the feminist theories invoked here is to shift the analytical gaze from ‘Did women ruin the workplace?’ to ‘Which women’s underpaid and invisible labour “built” this workplace, and which women’s demands for dignity are now framed as its ruin?’ It reveals how professionalism is a racialised and gendered construct and traces the continuity between colonial labour management and modern ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ organisational management. The artefact, in its fearful and entirely fictional construction of feminism and its nostalgia for a racially and sexually segregated past, reveals precisely who is afraid: those invested in a workplace that can no longer sustain the myth of its own neutrality, nor hide the foundational inequalities upon which it was built.