This is an edited version of remarks that were originally delivered in Rochester on September 17th at the opening of the 2026 Women’s Convention. Miriam Cates’s response is available here, and Angela Franks‘s will be published on Thursday. A full, unedited video of the panel discussion can be viewed here.
To begin with an obvious point (though one that has attracted a fair bit of controversy in recent years): human beings come in two types, male and female. In our species, it is the females who have evolved to perform the tasks of pregnancy and breastfeeding. In our species, the females are also smaller and weaker than the males, particularly in terms of upper-body strength. This strength difference is significant enough to produce a power imbalance at the individual level, such that most men can kill most women with their bare hands, but not vice versa. There are exceptions to this, but they are rare.
To progress to another obvious point, though this one is more controversial: the differences between male and female humans are not only to be found below the neck. There are substantial psychological differences between men and women across a range of traits. These include two facets of the Big Five—agreeableness and neuroticism—as well as differences in aggression, sexuality, intellectual interests, and more. Some of these differences are minor, while others are large.
To assess these statistical differences only in terms of single traits is to underplay quite how distinct the sexes really are. It is helpful to think of this using the model of a human face. The average female nose is somewhat smaller than the average male nose, but not enormously. We all know that some women have big noses, and some men have small noses. You cannot reliably guess a person’s sex if you only know their nose size.
But nose size is only one of dozens of sexed differences in facial anatomy. While an individual might have one or two outlier features, it is statistically very unlikely that all of their features will be atypical of their sex. A woman with a large nose is unlikely to also have a heavy brow and also a square jaw and also a markedly hairy upper lip. Not unless she has been exposed to levels of testosterone so high as to be clinically notable.
Similarly, when it comes to personality, a woman is unlikely to be disagreeable and low in neuroticism and aggressive and more interested in things than in people, all at the same time. If we can readily look at the constellation of human facial features and see a “female face”—making allowances for the odd outlier feature—then we can also look at the constellation of human personality traits and see a “female personality.”
Is this an offensive statement? I don’t think so, because I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with a female personality. Nor is there anything wrong with a male personality. Men and women have evolved to have different roles in social life and, just as our shoulder anatomy is suited to these roles, so too are our personalities. It is useful for men to be more aggressive, given that they have evolved to specialize in hunting and warfare. It is useful for women to be more neurotic, given that they have evolved to specialize in protecting children from harm. I believe that these are morally neutral statements.
But they are rarely treated as morally neutral, not least among feminists. I do understand why. History shows us that it is very easy to jump from the assertion that “men and women are different” to the assertion that “women are inferior to men.” We are all familiar with the weaponization of flimsy scientific arguments to justify the exclusion of women from public life. Julian Barnes once wrote about Germaine Greer’s response to a debating partner who tried to tell her that it was impossible for a woman to pilot an airplane because her menstrual cycle would cause too much psychological disturbance. According to Barnes, Greer simply raised an eyebrow and asked the man point-blank, “Am I menstruating now?” She succeeded both in embarrassing him and in making her point. It is evidently possible for women to perform roles they were once excluded from, whether as pilots or as public intellectuals, because modern women now do so every day of the week.
At the same time, we all know that Germaine Greer is an unusual woman across multiple dimensions. Psychologically speaking, she is the equivalent of a six-foot Amazon who can bench-press her body weight. Not only highly intelligent—which is unusual for both sexes—but also assertive, argumentative, nonconformist, and extraordinarily high agency.
All of the feminists of the second wave were, by necessity, very unusual women. My educated guess would be that, in terms of the Big Five profile, the typical second-wave feminist was likely to be both substantially higher in the openness trait and substantially less agreeable than the typical nonfeminist woman. She would need to be, in order to be attracted to the radicalism of the movement in the first place, and in order to weather the storm of social disapproval. Many of the women who formed the core of the second wave made dramatic changes to their lives as part of their activism: leaving their male partners, living with other feminists, forgoing motherhood, and rejecting their old social networks. And although the second-wave feminist movement emerged from the wider left, it was frequently in conflict with it. In 1969, at the New Left’s counter-inaugural to the Nixon inauguration in Washington, feminists who rose to speak were heckled by male comrades who shouted the most crude and aggressive forms of sexual abuse. The appropriate position for women on the New Left was “prone,” as Stokely Carmichael famously remarked. You didn’t become a second-wave feminist because you wanted to be liked.
Women with typically female personalities are rarely attracted to radical activism of any kind because it demands personality traits that are atypical for women. Women with typically female personalities are even less likely to be attracted to activism that is intent on giving women access to male-dominated professions and institutions. This introduces a problem: the women who end up representing “women,” as a group, are necessarily unusual women in terms of their personalities. We talk a lot about identity conflicts within feminism, particularly concerning race and class. Those conflicts are important. We talk a lot less about the role of personality in feminist conflict.
I want to zero in on just one personality difference in particular, which has an outsize impact on a person’s life. Agency is best understood as a facet of personality that affects a person’s ability to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment instead of just letting life happen to them. The lawyer and writer Helen Dale theorizes that the modern world is dominated by what she calls a “self-control aristocracy”: that is, highly agentic people who are able to make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf. They chafe against paternalistic restrictions on their behavior, because they personally have no need for them. Agentic people are particularly likely to get to the top of professional hierarchies that give them power over other people’s lives, and they have a tendency to assume that other people experience the world just as they do.
But the truth is that most people are not highly agentic. I suspect that this is one of those personality traits that can be roughly represented as a bell curve, with just a few people at the far-right tail who are really capable of thinking independently, exhibiting self-control, actively changing their environment in pursuit of a higher goal, and generally exerting power over their own lives. Most people aren’t like that.
One of the most instructive relationships of my life was with a girl whose name I can’t now remember. I was 26 and working at a rape crisis center. Part of my job was to meet with teenage girls who had been sexually abused, talk to them about their experiences, and help them with various practical tasks relating to the police investigation and their recovery. One of these girls was a very sweet and guileless 18-year-old who had been raped by an acquaintance. Let’s call her Jane.
Jane had a social worker, and I knew from their reports that she had been diagnosed with a mild intellectual disability, meaning that she had an IQ of between 60 and 70. She spoke quite normally, albeit with a limited vocabulary, but she struggled with cause and effect, and lacked worldliness in a way that amazed me. Before those hours spent in her company, I had never had an extended conversation with someone who struggled with daily tasks in the way she did. Even something as simple as taking a bus to the next town was beyond her.
I worried about Jane enormously, because she was both incredibly pretty, and also so agreeable that she was incapable of recognizing malice and manipulation in other people. She was a predator’s dream, not least because she was very low in agency, and had no hope of ever attaining a position in the “self-control aristocracy.” She was vulnerable by virtue of her sex, but in a way that highly intelligent and agentic women do not experience and often struggle to understand. Most people working in elite professions will not often encounter girls like Jane. If I hadn’t done my stint in the rape crisis sector, I would never have earned this glimpse into her life.
The standard feminist view in the post-second wave era is that women’s advocacy is a perennial necessity because men and women are fundamentally the same, and women have been continually thwarted by patriarchy in their attempts to live the same kinds of lives as men. If only we could recognize that women and men are psychologically indistinguishable, the argument goes, then we could remove the barriers that stop women from flourishing.
I’m arguing something quite different. I believe that women’s advocacy is a perennial necessity precisely because men and women are not the same. Both our physical and our psychological differences mean that women will always be at a disadvantage, both at a personal and a political level.
These differences compound. Within the home, being smaller and weaker than men makes us vulnerable to violence and intimidation. Pregnancy and childbirth force women to exit the labor market when children are born, and breastfeeding extends the period during which women are less able to earn money. Our psychological urge to be close to our children means that most mothers will want to spend less time away from the home during the early years. Our greater average agreeableness means that we are less likely to be assertive in interpersonal conflicts, including at work. Women are made vulnerable both by possessing female bodies and by possessing female personalities.
A woman with a classically female personality will be less likely to succeed professionally than her male peers because she will prioritize caring for others over gaining money and status. A woman like Jane—with a very exaggerated female personality, combined with intellectual disability—will be at a tremendous disadvantage for all her life. And there are at least as many Janes in the world as there are Germaine Greers.
All of these factors in combination mean that women are less likely to be found in the corridors of power, and mothers are even more underrepresented. When important political or business decisions are made that affect women’s lives, there may well not be any women in the room.
Note that this model of female disadvantage does not require men to be ogres. Powerful men who end up making decisions that are harmful to women can be well-meaning, but also oblivious to the ways in which women’s interests differ from their own. By rejecting the blank slate vision of sex differences, we can construct a feminist model of the world in which there is no oppressor class.
But this is a world in which feminist advocacy is nonetheless essential. Some of the most successful women’s advocates of the past were women who fully understood the nature of sexual difference. One of my heroines is the nineteenth-century British campaigner Josephine Butler, who devoted her life to advocating for prostituted women and children at a time when abusers not only went unpunished, but when the victims of the sex trade were themselves subject to persecution by police.
Men and women tend to regard prostitution differently, because male sexuality is different from female sexuality. Men tend to have more unrestricted sociosexuality—that is, they have a greater appetite for sexual variety and are more eager to have sex with strangers. They are also physically more capable of defending themselves from violence. In contrast, women tend to be highly, highly averse to having sex with strangers for both physical and psychological reasons. Most can withstand sex in prostitution only through dissociation and substance abuse. This means that while men tend to regard prostitution as shameful and grubby, but also as a source of pleasure and fun, women are more likely to understand the true evil of it.
The victims of the sex trade will always need women like Josephine Butler to be advocates for them. The women doing that work today include those at SPACE International who are themselves survivors of the sex industry, and who rely on the support of politicians, journalists, academics, and other people with positions of influence. Sometimes that support comes from men, but it is women who are more likely to viscerally understand the issue. This is why women in general benefit from the presence of women in powerful positions who can be effective advocates for other members of their sex.
But that benefit can only be realized if the women who attain these positions recognize their own strangeness, including when it comes to personality. A woman with the qualities needed to become a successful politician is very unlikely to ever find herself in the sex industry, and not only for socioeconomic reasons. It is girls like Jane who are most vulnerable to the worst kinds of abuse that men can perpetrate against women. As women, we can immediately understand the agony of that abuse. But women with atypical personalities can only understand the vulnerability of girls like Jane through special effort.
That’s why I am calling on us—to take on a paradoxical challenge. We have a duty to use whatever influence we have to advocate for other women, but we can only do this by remembering that we are unusual in all sorts of ways, including in terms of personality.
Adopting a mental model of the world that assumes that there is no such thing as “male” and “female” personalities—or even that there are no such things as “male” and “female” bodies—is enticing to atypical women. If the blank-slate vision of sex differences is true, then an egalitarian future is tantalizingly close.
The problem is that it isn’t true. Human beings really do come in two types, and those two types will forever be different from one another. This is exactly why there is a perennial need for women’s advocacy: because, without advocacy, the smaller, weaker, and more placid half of the population will forever be vulnerable to exploitation.
Women with female bodies and female personalities deserve to be safe, and to flourish. A shared commitment to that goal is why we are all gathered here today.
