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The real threat to the workplace isn’t women—it’s the panic that comes when power gets shared. Here’s what The New York Times got dead wrong.
Once again, mainstream media can’t stand it when women call bullsh*t on the status quo.
Two weeks ago, I watched the scene unfold as editors, journalists, and feminists fired back outrage. The anger was visceral, directional, and well deserved. Ross Douthat and The New York Time’s clickbait headline went well beyond being tone-deaf—more like equal parts misogyny and scapegoating.
And let’s get clear on one thing: A clickbait headline is a symptom, not a cause.
The “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” headline at the Times didn’t just break the internet—it broke trust. Their decision to greenlight Douthat’s piece shows either a complete lack of historical memory or a calculated play for rage clicks. Maybe both.
Four headline rewrites in a matter of days—a game of editorial whack-a-mole—only confirmed the outrage. You can’t put a fresh coat of paint on a burning house.
Whose House Is It Anyway?
As the Editor-in-Chief of PROVOKED, speaking to tens of thousands of women over 50 who have survived and rebuilt around these debates for decades: We know what a real workplace revolution feels like. I spent over two decades through the ’80s and ’90s inside four different Fortune 500 companies—living through the glass ceilings, the corporate gaslighting, and the wage charts spun as meritocracy. I’ve seen exactly how the system was built to keep women quiet and endlessly accommodating. As Jessica Valenti put it so perfectly: “How dare we not be grateful little worker bees holding up patriarchal capitalism while smiling through burnout and harassment?”
No, Ross. Women didn’t ruin the workplace. We’re done pretending we’re grateful just to be there.
‘Feminine Vices’—Weaponizing What Works
The suggestion that workplaces have fallen not because of bad management or greed, but because of empathy, intuition, or collaboration would be laughable if it weren’t so tired.
Let’s get specific:
- Women didn’t bring toxicity—the “Boys’ Club” did.
- Emotional intelligence and adaptive leadership drive measurable gains in performance and retention.
- Harvard Business Review, Deloitte, and Pew repeatedly confirm that diverse leadership outperforms alpha models.
Yet this kind of backlash runs beyond the male, pale, stale boys. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg declared the workforce needed more “masculine energy”—implying emotional intelligence and collaborative leadership are liabilities, not strengths. How are we still having this conversation in 2025? We covered that moment in PROVOKED, because it clarifies who gets to decide what authority “should” look like—and who pays the price for refusing to play along.
When men drive change, it’s labeled visionary. When women drive the same change, we’re called disruptive? Please.
Rage-as-Reason: What the Times Gets Dead Wrong
Let’s be honest. “Ruined” is code for “made the game fair.”
The panic here isn’t that women destabilized anything. It’s that men can no longer hoard every seat and call every shot.
Ms. Magazine dismantled this best: “Feminism isn’t the problem—patriarchy is. If the workplace felt ‘broken’ by women’s arrival, maybe it was the system, not the invitation list, that needed fixing.”
And Fast Company nailed it: “Maybe women did ‘ruin’ the workplace—for the boys’ club, that is. But to call that a loss is to decide equality, once it finally arrives, is a form of vandalism.”
How Corporate America Turned Feminism Into a Brand Campaign
What happened to liberation? Somewhere between boardroom buzzwords and International Women’s Day cupcakes, real change was dismissed. Instead of structural reform, companies offered tote bags and an HR training module on emotional resilience.
The problem isn’t that women failed to transform the system—the system learned to market feminism back to us while keeping power exactly where it’s always been. Progress became PR. Visibility was traded for actual authority. You can wallpaper a conference room with inspirational quotes, but try asking for pay equity or parental leave and watch how fast the fluorescent lights flicker.
Women over 50 know this playbook by heart. We’ve been trotted out as the diversity win, while decision-making remains locked behind doors. We’re allowed to see possibility, not touch it.
Exhaustion Isn’t Failure
The Times treats “exhaustion” as personal weakness instead of what it really is: systemic overload from carrying disproportionate weight on and off the clock. Girlboss burnout was inevitable. Ask me. In workplaces built on “visionary” myths, women are always expected to play by someone else’s rules. As Reshma Saujani slammed home: “No, women didn’t ruin the workplace. We just demand it be fixed.”
Data Worth Raging About
- Women hold 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEO roles.
- One in three women and 60 percent of mothers with young children spend five or more hours a day on caregiving and housework.
- 42 percent of women in the workplace say they feel burned out.
- Women are 28 percent less likely to be promoted to manager in their first five years.
- The pay gap for women hasn’t moved meaningfully in 20 years—82 cents to the dollar overall, 63 cents for Latina women, and 66 cents for Black women.
Who Gets to Ask the Questions?
“Who gets to ask the questions?” isn’t rhetorical. It’s foundational. Every time a male talking head frames gender progress as a crisis, the conversation reinforces who holds the microphone and what stories never get told. Giving Douthat a platform isn’t “neutral journalism”. It’s an old trick in the Boys’ Club playbook: preserving its own.
Douthat represents generations of unearned authority, recycling the idea that critique equals threat. As Women’s Agenda quipped: “Maybe the system wasn’t built for women because it was never supposed to last beyond the boys’ club.”
PROVOKED’s Stand: Tired of Asking, Ready to Organize
Here at PROVOKED, we’re not seeking seats at a sagging table. We’re building our own. We want a world that stops tossing so many damn balls in our direction and then calling us incapable for missing one.
Here Is What We Want
- Real parity: in pay, authority, and cultural capital.
- Systems that value care as the backbone of capitalism.
- An end to narratives asking whether women ruined anything.
We will not settle for visibility when we are owed power.
We. Are. Not. The. Problem.
It’s tempting to ignore the Times’s clickbait as relic thinking. But narratives like these shape culture, policy, and perception. This “debate” is cultural autoimmune disorder: a system attacking the agents of its own survival.
To every woman called “too ambitious”—don’t shrink.
Be the reason power is forced to update its standards.
Did women ruin the workplace? We’re the only hope it ever had.
Next. Headline. Please.
******
Footnote: The New York Times changed the headline on Ross Douthat’s article at least three times within days of publication—from “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” to “Have ‘Feminine Vices’ Taken Over the Workplace?”—without revising the core argument. This crisis management by headline says a lot about legacy media’s priorities … and why independent voices matter more than ever.
Now it’s not just women they’re blaming, but liberal feminism. Make sure the women are against each other. Anything but MEN.
The mental gymnastics are exhausting. I’m done coddling men’s fragile feelings while they complain about the very systems they built and still benefit from.
They’re terrified because they assume we’ll behave like them. They think that if we ever hold equal power, we’ll dole out the same harm, the same dismissiveness, the same generational silencing they’ve handed us.
We. Are. Not. The. Problem. 👏👏👏 And we never have been. Not even when they were burning us!
Side Tangent: Tired of men and Christians acting like women and liberals are trying to infringe upon their rights, when they’ve always had more rights and power than others. They are only trying to infringe upon ours. Why is it always projection? They love blaming us for what they are doing. So over it! (No disrespect to men and Christians that aren’t this kind.)
I am so tired of being told stay in my lane, don’t complain and be grateful for the scraps we (the men) give us. I literally had an employer tell me that I need to be ‘grateful’ I have my job at the time and to not think of advancement in the company because they needed me where I was and hired someone so unqualified and all because he’s a man.
Just like men complaining about talking to women. What they’re really complacent is not being able sexually harass women through inappropriate touching or verbal comments.