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.

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 China, a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses, small businesses, faster than men.

Factories not what they used to be - they're all extremely high-tech.

People with a college education are now less likely to divorce than they were a few decades ago, and they're more likely to describe their marriages as happy. That finding really surprised me. It appears that those with a higher education have been more able to dismantle strict traditional roles and, in doing so, gain more freedom. I call it a seesaw marriage, one in which both the man and the woman take turns being the breadwinner, making it possible for each of them to experience career advancements or breaks at different times.

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.

To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.