We are facing a fertility crisis. Men and women aren't getting together and having children at a high enough rate to continue the civilization. There are many theories attempting to diagnose this issue, including technology, the internet, social media, and feminism. While the tech issues are real and partially to blame, the issues from late-stage feminism run deeper.
Women have evolved to choose mates via hypergamy, that is desiring a man of higher social status than themselves. Before women entered the workforce, there were only men in high-status careers and positions of power. Women were attracted to those high-status men, married them, and had kids. When men filled just about every high-status role throughout society, that left a large pool of hypergamous mates for females to choose from. But when women entered the work force, they took many of those high-status jobs, reducing the pool of high-status men to choose from.
Therefore, feminism seems to be the blame for the decline of fertility. Except the cause might not be the mere fact that women entered the workforce. More specifically, it was Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. (Then again, DEI may be an inevitable result of feminism.)
Society could function with some feminism, as it did for the Boomers and Gen-X. They still got married and had kids with a feminist culture and women in the workforce. One could argue that the true cause must be technology, because the Boomers didn’t have to contend with the internet and social media. But there is another key issue.
Boomer feminism was before DEI. Women in the workforce were competing with men for jobs on an equal playing field (as everyone theoretically wants). When merit is all that matters in positions of prestige, men will (on average) out-compete women, as they did for the Boomers and Gen-X, before DEI.
Fertility relies on hypergamy. Women want to mate with men of higher status than themselves. So before the diversity movement to "level the playing field" and exclude white men from positions of prestige and power, white men predominantly attained those roles because they were simply better than their female and POC competitors. White men rose to the top, and women were attracted to them as mates. Americans got married, had kids, and the system worked.
But 2nd wave feminism (or 3rd wave, or whatever wave we are now surfing) threw a wrench into the hypergamy system. DEI did away with merit and forced women into positions of power, even if there were men who were better. This extended to just about every area of employment: business, science, engineering, medicine, academia, the arts, media, etc. Men were previously at the top of all those fields because the best people were chosen. It was a hierarchical system with the best men at the top, plus more men at the top of each sub-domain below them. It was men all the way down, with rare exceptions of outlier women who truly earned their way up the hierarchy of competence.
A hierarchy of competent men is needed, not just because organizations function better with the most competent people running them, but men need to attain prestigious positions so that women will be attracted to them and want to have their children.
There are certain domains, like airline pilots, where DEI could result in direct deaths, by promoting women into positions they are unqualified for and literally crashing airplanes (or helicopters). But DEI is responsible for much more indirect deaths--or rather, the prevention of births. DEI has blocked men and women of the Millennial and Zoomer generations from getting together in the first place due to its disruption of the natural hypergamy process. DEI is contributing deeply to the fertility crisis and, if not ended, may lead to the downfall of Western civilization.
We might be able to retain some degree of feminism in the culture. Women can maybe remain in the workforce as they did in the 70s and 80s, but there can be absolutely no DEI policies that promote women and try to engineer equal outcomes. Before the DEI movements, white men held almost all of the high-status roles in society. That was not because of racism or sexism--they were simply better. A true meritocracy is indistinguishable from white male supremacy. And that needs to be okay. The future of civilization depends on it.