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

We can keep whatever we like about manhood but adjust the parts of the definition that are keeping men back.

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.

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.

In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys.

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.

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.