Boise State prof with controversial views on women lands at influential think tank

Becca Savransky, The Idaho Statesman on Dec 26, 2025

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BOISE, Idaho — Boise State professor Scott Yenor, known for his comments calling independent women “meddlesome and quarrelsome” and advocating against feminism, has stirred up controversy on a national scale again.

Yenor has joined The Heritage Foundation, a strong influence in Republican politics — prompting at least one call for corporate donors to boycott the organization.

Yenor is the foundation’s director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies, according to The Heritage Foundation’s website. The foundation is the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, a blueprint that called for eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, restricting the right to abortion and reproductive freedoms and initiating mass deportations. President Donald Trump’s administration has followed many of its ideas.

Yenor is still teaching at Boise State. During the fall semester, he taught classical political thought and American political thought. In the spring, he is scheduled to teach modern political thought and constitutional law, university spokesperson Stephany Galbreaith told The Idaho Statesman.

In recent weeks, Yenor’s hire at The Heritage Foundation has spurred pushback. The National Organization for Women called for corporations to stop backing The Heritage Foundation and said the organization doubled down on misogyny with its hire. Corporations that support the foundation, it said, are enabling hate and bigotry. The organization cited Coors, ExxonMobil and Walmart. According to a fact check on Snopes, the corporations have in the past contributed, usually through their private foundations.

The call came after The Atlantic published an article questioning whether The Heritage Foundation supports “discrimination against women” based on Yenor’s hire and the ideas he has long voiced.

The article cited several of Yenor’s viewpoints, including a post on the Claremont Institute’s website calling for the overturning of the 1996 Supreme Court ruling that found Virginia Military Institute was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause by only allowing males. In the paper, Yenor argued that institutions “designed to promote manly honor or womanly grace” couldn’t survive under the ruling.

“Private male-only clubs will, by their nature, discriminate. A business that would like to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage, will discriminate. A national government that prevents women from serving in combat will discriminate,” he wrote. He also said governments should be able to “prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”

On X, Genevieve Wood, the vice president of development for The Heritage Foundation, called the Atlantic piece “invalid and disingenuous” and said people at the foundation can discuss a variety of topics without it being “cast as ‘Heritage policy.’ ”

Recently, The Heritage Foundation has seen a host of people leave after the foundation’s president defended an interview Tucker Carlson conducted with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, according to national media reports. The foundation also developed priorities that include policies to “restore the nuclear family to the center of American life.” The foundation asserts every child “deserves” to be born to a “married mother and father” and calls for reducing the “demand and supply for abortion.”

Since joining The Heritage Foundation, Yenor has written several posts on its website including one that he co-authored calling for U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to “grill” the birth control pill, which he said fosters “hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.” He called out the secretary for being “relatively silent on oral contraceptives.”

Yenor has long been a divisive figure in Boise.

In 2021, during the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, he railed against feminism, saying it “teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things.”

“Thus girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be,” he said. “They are more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.” He said young men should inspire women to be happy with “feminine goals” like homemaking and having children, and said women shouldn’t be recruited into engineering, medical school or law.

The comments went viral and hundreds of people protested at Boise State to fight for equality and a woman’s place in every industry and career. In 2024, he spoke on campus in a talk put on by Turning Point USA’s Boise State chapter.