What if the project of “female empowerment” has produced a quiet unraveling of competence, birth rates, and basic sanity as opposed to a fairer and more equal society?
In the latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast, behavioral psychologist Dr. Dani Sulikowski joins host Zahra Sethna to examine how female psychology — particularly female competition — plays out when scaled inside modern institutions.
Her core argument is stark: the behaviors women evolved to outmaneuver reproductive rivals did not disappear with modernity. They migrated into bureaucracies.
Sulikowski’s starting point is simple: men and women compete differently. Men tend toward direct, status-based contest. Women tend toward indirect strategies — reputational attacks, exclusion, and subtle sabotage.
In small communities, this dynamic constrained rival fertility. In today’s environment, Sulikowski argues, the same strategies operate inside universities, HR departments, Title IX offices, NGOs, schools, and hospitals. The difference is scale. Instead of undermining a handful of women, institutions now broadcast anti-family norms to entire cohorts — precisely as many women delay or forgo motherhood.
The questions raised in this broad-ranging conversation may be controversial but for the collapse-aware, they are certainly hard to dismiss. Anyone who has watched a workplace drift into performative process, or seen schools and courts prioritize ideology over function, will recognize the pattern — and understand why Sulikowski believes this moment is not an accident but an evolutionary logic playing out at scale.
