Heritage Foundation committee chair said it’s ‘not a failure’ to have all male Nobel Prize winners

Claim:

Scott Yenor, a committee chairman for the Heritage Foundation, stated in 2021 that recruitment efforts should avoid women in fields like engineering, medicine, and law, focusing instead on men, and that an all-male list of Nobel Prize winners is not a failure.

Rating:

Context

Widely shared social media posts accurately attribute the vast majority of these remarks to Yenor, though the final lines included in the circulating quote graphics actually originate from a television host’s commentary on his statements rather than Yenor himself.

Social media users widely circulated excerpts from an older speech given by a Heritage Foundation committee chair, sparking online discussions regarding traditional gender roles. This resurgence occurred amid ongoing public scrutiny linking conservative policy blueprints, such as Project 2025, to the broader political landscape.

Users across platforms like Threads and Facebook highlighted remarks purportedly made by Scott Yenor:

Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade. Efforts should be redoubled to encourage more men to enter the medical field, space exploration, mining endeavors and every other high-end and even low-end profession. If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s kind of a cause for celebration. Why can’t our celebration of male excellence in sports be translated into all facets of life? More successful men will mean more happy citizenry and a stronger nation.

Such medicated, quarrelsome and meddlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the western world, from the Greens in Germany to the Democratic Party in America. And if our ideal woman is a childless media scold or a barren bureaucratic apparatchik, there is no question whether we can have a future. We can’t. There is a question of whether we deserve one.

But women have fewer options, the thinking goes, they’ll have more children, they’ll be bound more tightly to the men in their lives with fewer ways out. This is about dragging the country back to a time when women had only one choice. To submit to men.

Yenor did indeed deliver the first two paragraphs of this statement during a 2021 appearance, though the text was reordered and omitted a few transitional sentences. However, the final paragraph concerning women having “fewer options” and being forced to “submit to men” originated from television commentary analyzing his speech, not from Yenor directly.

Yenor serves as the leader of the American Citizenship Initiative at The Heritage Foundation, a role focused heavily on traditional family structures. His appointment to the conservative think tank occurred well after the initial publication of Project 2025’s guiding mandate.

The 2021 Conference Remarks

In November 2021, Yenor spoke at a National Conservatism Conference hosted by The Claremont Institute. During his presentation, titled “The Family Form That Nations Need,” he outlined his perspectives on modern professional culture and demographic trends.

Approximately eleven minutes into the address, Yenor made the remarks regarding male recruitment in technical fields:

Our feminist culture leads us to want less male achievement. Their excellence, after all, creates inequities. That’s a shame. That denial of reality has to stop. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade. Efforts should be redoubled to encourage more men to enter the medical field, space exploration, mining endeavors and every other high-end and even low-end profession. If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s kind of a cause for celebration. Why can’t our celebration of male excellence in sports be translated into all facets of life. More successful men will mean more happy citizenry and a stronger nation.

Earlier in the same speech, at approximately the 2:32 mark, Yenor addressed women’s participation in modern bureaucratic and professional environments:

Our independent women seek their purpose in life in mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection and marketing. They’re more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such medicated, quarrelsome and meddlesome women gain their meaning through the seeming participation in the global project. They are agents of the new world, but not new life. Such women are now the backbone of every left-wing cosmopolitan party in the western world, from the Greens in Germany to the Democratic Party in America. And if our ideal woman is a childless media scold or a barren bureaucratic apparatchik, there is no question whether we can have a future. We can’t. There is a question of whether we deserve one.

The Misattributed Conclusion

The final segment commonly attached to social media quote cards does not appear anywhere in Yenor’s speech. Investigations into the origin of those specific sentences trace them to a broadcast segment featuring television host Ali Velshi, who was offering editorial commentary on Yenor’s platform and ideology.

During that broadcast, Velshi stated:

So their answer is to push women back in their place, to strip away their autonomy, to push them out of public life, to narrow the futures available to them. Ultimately, this agenda is not really about solving demographic decline. […] If women have fewer options, the thinking goes, they’ll have more children. They’ll be bound more tightly to the men in their lives with fewer ways out. This is about dragging the country back to a time when women had only one choice: to submit to men.

Following public backlash over his 2021 comments, Yenor clarified via social media that his intention was not to ban women from specific jobs, but rather to halt targeted incentives aimed at recruiting women into fields where they showed lower interest. Meanwhile, representatives for The Heritage Foundation have maintained that affiliated scholars are entitled to express independent viewpoints without those perspectives automatically constituting organizational policy.

Sources