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

Scott Yenor, who made the statement, is the chairman of one Heritage Foundation initiative, but did not contribute to Project 2025. Published Aug. 16, 2026 Claim: Scott Yenor, chairman of a Heritage Foundation initiative, said in 2021: "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. If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that's not a failure." ContextPopular posts on Facebook and Threads correctly attribute to Yenor most of an excerpt of a speech given by him, though the final few sentences of the quote meme actually consist of someone else's commentary on Yenor's remarks. In August 2026, an old quote from a Heritage Foundation committee chair spread online, in which he allegedly expressed regressive views about women. The quote spread months after Snopes investigated the connections between U.S. President Donald Trump's second administration and the Project 2025 initiative — a blueprint for reshaping the federal government promoted by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Many online claimed Scott Yenor, a Heritage Foundation initiative chairperson, had once expressed negative views about women in engineering and other fields traditionally thought of as "male." According to posts on Threads (archived) and Facebook, Yenor allegedly said: 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. (Threads user @tracifairheart) Yenor did indeed make most of the above statement in 2021, excluding the last few sentences of commentary and not in the order in which it is presented. We rate this claim as a correct attribution on the whole, with the caveat that the last paragraph shared in quote memes was actually part of a commentary on Yenor's opinions by MS NOW host Ali Velshi. As of this writing, Yenor is listed on The Heritage Foundation's website as the chairman of the "American Citizenship Initiative," which appears to focus on promoting so-called traditional family values. Other commentary by Yenor published on the Heritage Foundation includes "Married Women Reap More From the Festive Season Than Singles" and "Porn is Poisoning Our Culture." Yenor is not, however, listed as a contributor to Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership," The Heritage Foundation's report detailing proposals to cut or reduce federal departments, as well as its overall agenda for a conservative government. Yenor's appointment to the Heritage Foundation committee took place in December 2025, long after the "Mandate for Leadership" was published. We reached out to The Heritage Foundation for comment and to learn whether Yenor still ascribes to the views he expressed in the video, outlined below. We will update this report accordingly. 'The Family Form That Nations Need' In November 2021, Yenor gave a speech titled, "The Family Form That Nations Need," at the National Conservatism Conference held by The Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. The full video of his speech can be accessed on YouTube: At the 11:00 mark, Yenor speaks the words quoted in social media posts (emphasis ours): 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. Perhaps mandatory gun training should — I'm from Idaho so I'm required to say that — the promotion of wrestling and other acts of physical courage are necessary in our age of "soy boys." Our celebration of diversity is just the opposite of the strength that we need as a country. So much in our culture and in our politics complicates the male-female dance in addition to that. The continuation of the passage actually came earlier in Yenor's speech, at the 2:32 mark (emphasis ours): But what does this independent woman really mean? 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. Misattributed addendum Yenor's speech did not contain the following paragraph, which was tacked onto the bottom of the passage in some image memes sharing the quote: Snopes searched for evidence that Yenor actually said or wrote any part of the above words and found none, but we did find a Facebook post in which Yenor's statements were paired with a March 2026 episode of MS NOW host Ali Velshi's show. In that show, as part of a commentary on Yenor's opinions, it was Velshi who uttered the final sentences of the quote meme (at 11:29 in the MS NOW video, emphasis ours): 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. In December 2021, Yenor posted a follow-up statement on X (archived), denying he wanted to prevent women from being in such professions, instead saying "special efforts to recruit women into fields where they don't seem to want to be" should be stopped. In December 2025, a Heritage Foundation employee responded on X (archived) to an Atlantic article criticizing Yenor's appointment and labeling it as Heritage supporting discrimination against women: Heritage is fortunate to have amazingly talented teammates, where scholars and staff at all levels (and both sexes) are free to discuss and debate ideas on a wide range of topics without it being cast as a "Heritage policy." People know a Heritage policy when they see it, and we will continue to advance common sense conservative solutions for the American people. Snopes has reported on Project 2025 extensively, including how the Trump administration's policies are overlapping with the ideas put forth by the conservative think tank. Sources Detzel, Allison. "The Group behind Project 2025 Has a Chilling New Plan for America's Women." MS NOW, 17 Mar. 2026, https://www.ms.now/ali-velshi/project-2025-heritage-foundation-plan-american-women-abortion-education-family. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Ibrahim, Nur, and Aleksandra Wrona. "The Facts About Project 2025: The Pro-Trump Proposal To 'Reshape America.'" Snopes, 11 July 2024, https://www.snopes.com//news/2024/07/11/project-2025-explained/. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Ibrahim, Nur, and Aleksandra Wrona. "Trump Policies and Statements Related to Project 2025: A Collection." Snopes, 21 Dec. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//collections/project-2025-implementation-trump/. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Ordoñez, Franco. "Trump Has Rolled out Many of the Project 2025 Policies He Once Claimed Ignorance About." NPR, 19 Jan. 2026. Politics. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2026/01/19/nx-s1-5640006/trump-has-rolled-out-many-of-the-project-2025-policies-he-once-claimed-ignorance-about. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026."Scott Yenor: The Family Form That Nations Need - National Conservatism Conference II ." YouTube, Claremont Institute, 22 Nov. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOu9Fby4pro. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Simonson, Amy, and Jenn Selva. "Protests Held at Boise State after Professor Says at Conference That Men, Not Women, Should Be Recruited into Fields like Medicine and Law." CNN, 8 Dec. 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/08/us/boise-state-professor-men-women-studies. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Wilson, Jason. "'Just Disgraceful': Outcry as Heritage Thinktank Appoints Far-Right Figure to Key Post." The Guardian, 15 Dec. 2025. US News. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/15/heritage-foundation-thinktank-scott-yenor. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Yenor, Scott . "Happy Holidays: Married Women Reap More From the Festive Season Than Singles." The Heritage Foundation, https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/happy-holidays-married-women-reap-more-the-festive-season-singles. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026.Yenor, Scott. "Porn Is Poisoning Our Culture." The Heritage Foundation, https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/porn-poisoning-our-culture. Accessed 1 Apr. 2026. By Nur Ibrahim Nur Nasreen Ibrahim is a reporter with experience working in television, international news coverage, fact checking, and creative writing. Article Tags