If my own current husband was suddenly a stay-at-home dad, it would be emasculating. That would be hard for me.

What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills: You need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly to be able to listen to people and to operate in a workplace that is much more fluid than it used to be. Those are things that women do extremely well.

Men need marriage more than women do. In fact, they need it to survive.

What I've found is that there is an enormous shift taking place in our society. Suddenly there are all young women who are better educated and earning more money than men their age. When young couples today decide to marry, they have very different expectations of one another than their parents did. And there's even been change at the very top of the career ladder. People tend to underestimate that.

In the US in recent years, around a third of all open management positions have gone to women. My research over the last three years has shown that the trend is going in the same direction at all levels. And by the way, it's not necessarily that the rise of women is causing the end of men - it's more the other way around. An increasing number of men are failing during their education, losing their jobs and then not managing to get back on their feet, so women have had to step in. The driving force here isn't feminist conviction, it's economic necessity.

If you look at total numbers in the working and middle class, men still on average make more than women.

Men aren't able to find jobs anymore, and they're withdrawing from society, essentially creating a matriarchy. For the upper social classes, marriage is still a successful model, but for poorer people it's not.