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.

It's a fact that within the space of a few decades, women have achieved a massive shift in the role they play - in the way they act in public, and in the way they have conquered areas of the working world that were until recently considered a man's domain.

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.

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.

The general image of a man in an American sitcom is like a complete moron. You'd think the industry was run by a feminist cabal.

That's not a convincing argument. Public sector jobs are cyclical. Teachers get fired when money is tight, then rehired when things get better. Manufacturing jobs, on the other hand, aren't coming back. They're relics of a past age.

If men can quilt and take over the kitchen, then women can pick up a wrench and fix a leaky pipe.