‘Masculine Energy’ Is Costing Companies Billions

In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that the corporate world needed more "masculine energy" and a culture that "celebrates the aggression a bit more." Twenty months later, the political movement he was courting looks much weaker. Donald Trump's average approval rating fell to 38 percent in September, the lowest of his second term.

But the ideal Zuckerberg praised remains omnipresent in corporate America. Women lead 56 Fortune 500 companies this year, a record that still only amounts to 11.2 percent of the list. They hold 29 percent of C-suite roles, the same share as in 2024, according to McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s Women in the Workplace report. Bragging, shows of strength and risk-taking get rewarded far beyond the military, while cooperation and caution continue to be seen as weakness.

The labor market is moving in the opposite direction. In 2025, private education and healthcare, where women hold 77 percent of jobs, added around 800,000 positions while all other sectors combined lost about 500,000, according to this analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Many of the jobs created are badly paid. In my book,  En Finir avec La Productivité (in English Against Productivity is how I would translate the title), I argued that economists label care work "low productivity" mostly because the workers earn low wages. The true economic contribution of essentially female workers is seen as negligible even though it actually sustains the productivity of everybody else (you cannot work in finance or accounting if there's nobody to look after your children, for example).

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