RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Up next is Hanna Rosin, a national correspondent at The Atlantic, author of a big book on tonight’s topic, The End of Men, and a former high-school debater, is that right?
HANNA ROSIN: That’s true. I would like to point out that I am in a room full of men, which always makes the interviews awkward, but that’s okay.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: So, in a sense, you’re the Rembrandt in tonight’s debate.
HANNA ROSIN: Because I was a debater in high school? Because I know how to debate? Yes, it was my nerdy life in high school; I spent 80 percent of my time debating around the country, which may not increase my cool factor.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Debating is the new cool. Let’s start off by talking about your book, because you have two good analogies for talking about what is going on with gender today. You talk about plastic women and cardboard men. Can you unpack that for us?
HANNA ROSIN: My central thesis is that the global economy is changing really rapidly and for whatever reason a lot of women are having an easier time adjusting to that than men. Is it because women are smarter? Well, no, turns out they’re not smarter; men and women test equally. Is it because they are sort of biologically made for this moment? I’m not a biological determinist so I don’t actually believe that. After talking to a lot of economists, I came up with this idea that women are just more flexible. It is partly a trait that comes from being the underdog for so long; underdogs are always more adaptable and flexible than the people at the top, who get sort of hardened and rigid. I believe we are at a historical moment in which things have sort of aligned for women. So plastic woman is more flexible; the cardboard man refers to the ways in which men have difficulty being more adjustable and flexible. A lot of this is not just about the economy and the jobs we take; it is also about our conceptions of manhood.
There’s a woman who talks about “masculine mystique,” and what she means by that is that men are sort of where women were in 1962. In 1962 women were defined in a narrow way — they were put in a little box that made it more difficult for them to move anywhere or do anything. I think there might be a little bit of that going on with men right now because we define masculinity in a narrow way.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: That is a key point. In your book, you argue that men are very concerned about their ability to provide for their families, that the role of provider is intimately linked to male concepts of masculinity. In an economy where blue-collar jobs are just shipped overseas, the pillar of masculinity collapses.
HANNA ROSIN: Yes, and that is really important. If you look at our classic feminist texts by Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, they talk about how women learn that they are like the second sex in the family, that they understand that they are relegated to a certain position because the man knows that he is the breadwinner. So that set-up is really falling apart. More women are providers for their families. The upper classes have sort of remade marriages in a more give-and-take, more equal way. The working classes see that men are just falling off the map — like it’s hard for them to find work and they’re not really acting as fathers for their children, so that is not as good. But I think that when culture starts to fall apart, a lot of things change. Men and women look at each other completely differently; it is no longer assumed that the man is dominant. The hierarchy falls apart from the way that we have understood it for tens of thousands of years.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Do you think children of all backgrounds, not just the poor, will thrive in this new world of increasingly fatherless families?
HANNA ROSIN: The end-of-men phenomenon feeds into the worst social change that is going on in the world right now, which is the hardening of income inequality. The answer to your question is the same as the answer to almost every question involving income inequality: if you’re at the top, the world is your oyster. You get better grades than you ever did, you’ve got more money than you ever did, your parents pay more attention to you than they ever did. And if you grow up and go to college, life will be much better for you. Beyond the college-educated, which is the vast majority of people — the college-educated make up 30 to 35 percent of the population, depending on the country — your life is much worse. You are far more likely to be living with a single mom, who is probably struggling and doing the best she can. So, your life is a little bit harder, you probably have very little money, and your mom is probably not working a great job. It’s not like the end of men means all women are working fabulous jobs. A lot of times they’re underpaid, working low-wage jobs, but at least they are working. There’s an economist who calls this “the last one holding the bag” theory, which doesn’t sound awesome. The mom is left with the kid and she is doing the best that she can. So that is a problem.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: What about people from the developing world who are concerned about sexual violence toward women in places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and India. Do you think the rise of women is also unfolding in the developing world?
HANNA ROSIN: Yes, in totally different ways. I get letters that surprise me. For example, I got letters from a group of seamstresses in Gaza who told me that they totally get what I am talking about in my book. They told me that even though we live in totally different worlds, all of the women they know that go to school end up getting their diploma or degree while the men don’t stay in school. They said they won’t let men tell them who to marry. So, does that mean that women in Gaza are totally liberated and get to do what they want and have sex like they want or are even on the path to being like us? No. But look at Liberia as an example, a war-torn country where they have suddenly decided that women are going to save everything. International aid organizations are big into female quotas in politics because there is this sense in the international aid world that we need women to come in and rescue things. So, it’s not the same as it is here but we do have the sense that the energy is with women, and the changes are with women. But no, it’s not feminist liberation like in America circa 1975.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: You mention in your book that South Korean families would rather have a daughter than a son, which is interesting because up until very recently the country would have been considered quite patriarchal. What is driving that?
HANNA ROSIN: That is my absolute favourite statistic in my whole book because it was so surprising.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: That blew me away. I hope you use it tonight.
HANNA ROSIN: Yes, a statistician who had listened to my radio show at Slate gave it to me. I had mentioned that I was going to Korea and he emailed me and said that he had all the Koreans’ data from the last fifty years.
South Korea remains a thoroughly patriarchal society — you will not find one single woman at the top of any of these huge corporations. On the other hand, the rise of women has caused tremendous social disruption in the country: laws, universities, the age at which people get married — many Korean women don’t want to get married and assume the traditional Korean wife role — have all changed. So you have a situation where women are rising but the culture won’t; it’s just rumbling and rumbling. The culture won’t let it happen, like in Japan. The one major thing that has changed is that the preference for the first-born child has totally flipped, which has really been in the last couple of years, so that couples now say they would rather have a daughter than a son.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: This is a key part of your argument, which is that it is really about trends. It doesn’t just look at how many women are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies; it’s about a line stretching out into the future that shows that women are going to do pretty well for the coming century.
HANNA ROSIN: I’ve never been in a debate where I’m not talking about CEOs, but to me it’s the least interesting and least imaginative way to approach this issue. First of all, when you talk about CEOs, you’re talking about such a miniscule percentage of the population; the culture is in a tremendous upheaval and all we talk about is a tiny slice at the top. And it’s unimaginative because, yes, you can take a snapshot right now and see that there are many more male CEOs, but what I am talking about is a trend dating back forty years. Men have been in power for, like, 40,000 years or, as Caitlin says, 100,000 years. So it’s not like there has been a grand revolution and everything will flip overnight. If it had happened that way we would have read about it in the papers, it would have even driven Rob Ford out of the papers; that, if nothing else.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: But when you see those lines for women going up into the future and male performance lines going down, do you think there is a revolution for women out there at some point? Maybe in 2050 or 2100? Do you think we need some big, societal change?
HANNA ROSIN: This is where I’m hesitant. I’m totally not hesitant about the cultural change, the change in the structure of families, the change in the way men and women regard each other. I have become very hesitant about the change at the very top because I don’t like to construct this argument such that women become men, like the world flips in a totally predictable way, where women want to become CEOs. They don’t. I mean, women are different than men, they have a different sense of where power comes from, of how power, aspiration, and ambition work, so they don’t just want to be the head of Fortune 500 companies. It’s not the way women are built. Power comes in all different ways; maybe the economy will change to accommodate that. I’m not really sure how it will turn out, but it’s not as simple as men stay home and take care of the children and women become CEOs. There is no way it will play out in that way.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Not a world of Amazons?
HANNA ROSIN: No.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Well, Hanna Rosin, thank you so much for your time today.
HANNA ROSIN: Thank you.