Het einde van de man: en de opkomst van de vrouw

by Hanna Rosin, Sandra van Oudenaarden (Translator)

Mannen zijn niet langer de dominante sekse. Voor het eerst in de geschiedenis zijn ze door de vrouwen voorbijgestreefd.

Vrouwen hebben bewezen dat ze in staat zijn zich beter aan te passen aan deze tijd. Dat hebben ze te danken aan hun flexibiliteit en onafhankelijkheid. De Amerikaanse journalist Hanna Rosin beschrijft in dit opzienbarende boek hoe de nieuwe vrouw-manverhouding eruitziet. Ze laat zien hoe mannen en vrouwen op heel verschillende manieren geld verdienen en uitgeven, leren, een partner vinden - zelfs doden. Voor het eerst is de wereldeconomie een plek waar vrouwen meer succes hebben dan mannen. Dat deze ontwikkeling verregaande gevolgen heeft op het gebied van werk, relatie en sociale omgang mag geen verassing heten. Maar zowel vrouwen als mannen kunnen zich aanpassen aan deze nieuwe werkelijkheid om zo een betere toekomst te creëren.
Rosin heeft haar betoog onderbouwd met onderzoeken en cijfers uit de hele wereld.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Sociology, Politics, Gender, Womens, Psychology

287 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Hanna Rosin was born in Israel and grew up in Queens, where her father was a taxi driver. She graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1987, where she won a number of competitions on the debate team with her partner David Coleman. She attended Stanford University, and is married to Slate editor David Plotz; they live in Washington, D.C. with their three children.

Reviews

[Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is my first goodreads review. I'm writing it because I'm on page 89 and I've almost thrown this book across the room 91 times. I can't wait three more weeks until book club to express my disdain. Hanna Rosin is not a sociologist, she's not an economist, and she doesn't have anything interesting to say. One particularly egregious paragraph in the introduction begins, "Yes, the United States and many other countries still have a gender wage gap. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of power are still dominated by men." Nevertheless, Rosin manages to conclude at the end of the very same paragraph -- citing "dozens of undergraduate women" who see "guys" as "the new ball and chain," -- that "The modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards."

As Mary Beard put it in her Guardian review, "That will come as a surprise to most women in the world." This ridiculous discussion of a new matriarchy is not only misguided, it's dangerous in a country where women in every state make (at best!) 3/4 of what men make. And when Rosin tries to expand her thesis to talk of the global trend of female empowerment, I question the appropriateness of the "non-fiction" label.

Save 17 dollars and just read the Atlantic article that started all this, or better yet, don't.

I hope there's plenty of wine at book club.

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a curious, curious book. It is certainly well written and researched but the argument is extremely unconvincing because it is so very selective. More than once, Rosin claims, for example, that sexual assault rates are lower than ever. She also says this angers feminists as if feminists want women to be raped at high rates. Rosin doesn't acknowledge how under reported rape is, nor does she begin to broach the topic of sexual harassment and street harassment women face. Not a day goes by when I don't read some kind of blog post about a woman being harassed or receiving unwanted attention from men in public. Any argument can be made when you cherry pick statistics but there's always more to the story and that's where this book fell short. In too many places, the writing ignored the bigger, more complex story. I'm writing about this book at greater length elsewhere so I will leave it at that. Also, the way she talks about black women is super uncomfortable.

[Jo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Make no mistake here; this book is drivel.

Before I deliver my thoughts on this book, I must state that despite the title being The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, I personally picked out this book due to curiosity, and not because I'd like males to be completely wiped out.

I am confused with what Rosin was hoping to achieve with this. This book was hailed as 'Essential reading for our times' so I expected something to dazzle me, and possibly even inspire me. Unfortunately, absolutely nothing happened for me. Of course, I rolled my eyes here and there at some of the absurd statements written by Rosin, and I'm certainly not stupid enough to believe them. The main issue here, is she rambled on with lots of information flying out here and there, but there wasn't anything notably substantial to back it up, and that is where this book failed.

The first aspect I noticed almost immediately, is that Rosin has cut out any contribution from the LGBTQ community, making it seem like they do not exist. That does not sit well with me. Secondly, the manner in which Rosin refers to men is utterly contempuous, and she makes it seem almost like women need to be total bitches in order to get to the top, which brings me to the totally misleading title.

The book spends a lot of time examining heterosexual married couples, the woman always being the breadwinner, and what sort of impact that has on the man. So essentially, this book is all about the money, and there is very little on inspirational feminism.

There is a lot of strange content in this book, such as this; apparently, many women let vulgar male porn culture go over their heads, more or less ignoring it altogether. From my perspective, this is utter bullshit. Porn culture like that can reek dangerous misconceptions on what young women think is expected of them during sex, or how they should look, or doing it just to please the male. I also noticed that Rosin wrote in that the success of of a woman, is based on their hook-up habits. How can anything like that determine how successful a woman can be in her line of work? I'm positive that a male who is successful can lay with as many people as he likes and still be a success, and quite honestly, it probably wouldn't be questioned.

This book was was inadequately written, presented almost in a list form, with much of the information not elaborated on, therefore forming skeletal meaningless arguments that have had zero impact on me as an individual.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

As many other comments have already noted, this book is short-sighted. The first problem is that Rosin is really relying on antiquated gender binaries to define the roles of heterosexual men and heterosexual women. She ignores the contributions of the LGBTQ community as though they haven't factored into the revolutionary re-positioning of humans in our society and culture. Second, her tone is so dismissive of men and so cavalier concerning their roles as husbands and fathers, that is seems that she is trying to affect an attitude that she believes is now the right of successful women - condescending and bitchy. Third, by elevating the social, economic, and cultural power of women - a worthy achievement without question - she denigrates our past - as though women throughout history have been miserable, unhappy, and unfulfilled before the business suit came along. That is wrong and a disservice to all women who find fulfillment in traditional roles, do not believe they are without power or choice, and have no need to feel competitive with men in any realm. I believe that is the crux of this issue - it is the equivalent of sticking out your tongue and saying "nah nah nah" to men, as though we still have to compete with them at any level. Why must we? It would seem that a celebration of equality for all persons, no matter what their gender or sexuality, with a focus on supporting and encouraging their choices, whether it's to stay at home as a caregiver, or join the workforce, would be a better service to society. This book is meant to divide, not celebrate our many roles or join together. Sad that to sell books, we are reduced to this.

[wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that the reviewers in general have been a little tough on Ms. Rosin. Its funny to me that this website is exactly what Ms. Rosin it talking about. Look at the people who are trying to win books. Even the books with male oriented themes - a large majority that try to win them are women. I teach (for 25 years) at a junior college and the young women are better prepared (in general) more highly motivated and goal driven than the young men (and they READ more). This is what Ms. Rosin is arguing with a nice blend of statistics and personal anecdotes. There is a trend she points out at four year private colleges to use affirmative action to get enough males in to have some semblance of gender balance. Some women are not marrying as the males that are available to them would just be another mouth to feed or not challenging to them intellectually. Some of Rosin's assertions are a little too broad but the principle theme that gender relationships are changing rapidly and are having a profound affect in families, the work place and in life in general all across the world is true. For some the message might be painful but the truth can hurt. All should read this book with an open mind. Don't fault her for not offering solutions as that was not the purpose of the book.

[Brianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I was reading this book, it seemed to me that Rosin made no real attempt to deconstruct the social anxieties surrounding these shifting paradigms of power and gender, in fact I felt that parts of her book played dangerously into fears of emasculation. Rosin makes a passing reference to the ways in which professions or careers associated with women are often devalued, but makes no attempt to deconstruct this mode of thinking. It seemed to me that at various time Rosin had the potential to make some insightful observations but always ⎯at the last moment⎯ lapses into tired gender stereotypes to bolster her argument. I'm sure that this was not her intention, but by not questioning or thinking critically about these gendered binaries that she uses to construct her argument, she normalizes them, and I found this tendency quite irritating. I also took issue with the way in which she constantly seems to pit men and women against each other as competitors and rivals. If it's true that men are threatened by women's upward mobility and professional success, I would like to see a more in-depth exploration of why that is, and how that's tied to history, power structure, and culture, among other things. Lastly, as a few other reviewers have already commented, I found her discussion of sexual assault and gendered violence extremely reductive. All in all, while the book was an interesting read and obviously well researched, I think that Rosin ignores a lot of the complexities and nuances of an extremely complicated topic.

[Diane Shipley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nope.

[Anna]

Full (somewhat rambling) review: http://annajcook.blogspot.com/2012/09...

Excerpt:

In the event you've been in a media blackout since July 2010, Rosin originally wrote an article for The Atlantic under the same sensationalist title (a title which she apologizes for as the book dedication; perhaps that's when you should rethink your marketing strategy?). Said article was one of a rash of journalism-lite pieces proclaiming the 2008 recession a "he-cession" and suggesting that as male unemployment rose it was women who stood to gain in both economic opportunity and political and social power. "The End of Men" painted a bleak picture of a future "matriarchy" in which high-powered, controlling women run the world while their college dropout loser husbands hang out with soiled toddlers ignoring the responsibilities of grown-up life. The End of Men is essentially a book-length elaboration on this apocalyptic vision of an upturned gender binary that -- rather than creating space for more egalitarian, gender-independent relationships -- merely reverses the stark hierarchy of the most aggressive patriarchal society.

...The strange beings who populate The End of Men appear to have no inner life or motivation beyond fulfilling (or overcoming) the fact of their gender. Religious beliefs or social justice values? A sense of how, as an individual, the person wants to shape a meaningful life? What sort of parent they want to be, where their creative passion lies, none of this matters. The only value any being in Rosinland seems to possess is monetary, and whether their monetary fortunes go up or down seems to be a question of how skillfully they perform gender. The women who populate Rosinland are a breed of Amazonian high-achievers whose interest in people with penes seems wholly dependent on their material utility (and possibly their genetic matter and/or ability to provide fucks on a somewhat regular basis). She actually invokes Charlotte Perkins Gilman's embarrassingly racist Herland as a literary example of the world she believes we're charging toward.

And cites it as a victory for the feminist agenda. Once again, I failed to get that memo.

Because Rosin thinks women only want men for their economic assets*** she is obviously puzzled by the couples she encounters where women are (for example) pursuing advanced degrees while their partners are content with a quieter life. In Rosinland, deliberately picking a low-key job in order to have time to go fishing with your buddies, play video games, or (gasp!) be a stay-at-home dad are sneer-worthy life choices.

Excuse me for living, but men are hardly the only ones to value friendships and leisure time, fandoms and family over a high-paying career that might bring in over $100k per year but demand eighty hours per week in return. I kept waiting for The End of Men to take me on a tour of hetero relationships that have found equitable footing (I know a number of them!), where the partners actually, you know, care about one another as people rather than monitoring their significant other for how well they're fulfilling a prescribed social role. Yet in Rosinland these relationships do not exist.

[Jared Millet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can imagine that this is a great book for starting arguments. I can also imagine that lots of people wouldn’t want to wait until finishing the book to let the argument begin. All through reading it, I kept wanting to tap the author on the shoulder and say, “but wait a minute! Here’s what I think.” This is a book that demands discussion, and earns an extra star on that point alone.

Despite the sensationalist title, the book is basically a progress report on the state of modern feminism – how far women have come, how far is left to go, and how many feel about it right now. The facts of the case will be surprising to those who haven’t been paying attention to the numbers: modern colleges are dominated by young women, and single, childless women under 30 make more money than single, childless men in the same demographic. The Great Recession, at least initially, impacted male workers far more than women – Rosen argues that women are successfully adapting to the new economic realities of the 21st century and men, as yet, have not. And we all know what happens to species that don’t adapt to changes in the environment, don’t we?

It’s obvious why the numbers should scare men, but Rosen’s thesis hits a raw nerve with women as well. I don’t normally read the other reviews on Goodreads until after I’ve written my own, but this time I was curious. (Again, that need for discussion.) Some critics seem to worry that lauding so many advances for women might cloud the truth that there’s still a lot of work yet to be done. Some might be too heavily invested in the old feminist narrative – that we live in a world dominated and controlled by an evil, all-powerful patriarchy. While it’s true that our politics and corporate boardrooms are still male-dominated, Rosen portrays these groups as the last gasp of the old guard, desperately clinging to the bow of the Titanic as it goes under the inevitable tide of the young, majority-female educated workforce.

I could go on forever, and that’s exactly what this book tempts me to do. The Battle of the Sexes will always be a hot topic of discussion, and right or wrong, Rosin deserves lots of kudos for reframing the debate into one not rigidly locked into our grandparents’ conceptions of who and what men and women should be.

P.S. I was pointed toward this book by Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish. Read it.

[Iris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hanna Rosin, I'm a fan - I subscribe to the fabulous Double X podcast (a spin-off of the Slate section that she founded and edits), and her work for the Atlantic is among the most original and insightful long-form pieces. She's written about crime moving from urban to suburban areas (July 2008), about evangelical Christianity's role in schools and the economy (in the Atlantic and her first book, God's Harvard), and, of course, the earth-quaking End of Men (July 2010). The last piece is absolutely a must-read.

After that, you know whether you need to spring for the book-length treatise. My one disappointment with the book is with Rosin's focus on the most wealthy groups in America; while her male subjects are blue-collar or at least pay lip service to labor, her female subjects are, if not the 1%, the 2% and I felt that as such she misses out on what the rest of us experience in the great recession -- for instance, the lack of monetary value attached to so historically feminine a profession as teaching. The "rise of women" hardly makes it easy for women to make six figures.

[Kate O'Hanlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The is a frustrating book. Rosin is a journalist, not a social scientist, and the shifting gender roles she's elucidating really deserve a more rigorous analysis. (The plural of anecdote is not data, but we know that already.)

It's an easy read (and it's fun getting dirty looks on the train from people who see the cover) and it is interesting. It's just not all that persuasive in the end, perhaps because it's not really clear what Rosin is trying to convince me of. Is the rise of women economically, domestically and educationally (though not politically , Rosin never touches this) good for women? The focus here is overwhelmingly on middle and upper middle class women and the 'having it all means doing it all'. Ambitious teens who want to make 6 figure salaries seem to be held up as a good thing but (and this is my Euro-slacker attitude showing) it just sounds exhausting. Rosin is more interesting when her focus is on working class men and women, but there's only really one chapter devoted to this.

[Grouchy Editor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barring some sort of nuclear catastrophe, in which case all of those post-apocalyptic movies will come true and Denzel Washington will rule the Earth, it looks as though Rosin is correct: The end of male dominance as an economic and social force is nearly here. Rosin makes a convincing argument that the future belongs to the gender more able to adapt to a health and service-oriented economy –- and that ain’t Denzel. But if she thinks men will cede all that power with a whimper and not a bang, I think she’s mistaken. Here are a few of this lowly dinosaur’s gripes about her (well-written) book:

1) While cheering the advances women have made over the past 40 years, Rosin tells us, numerous times, that she is “mystified” by men’s reluctance or resistance to conform to the new, estrogen-fueled world order. But I’m mystified why she is mystified. Is it really so hard to grasp that any human being, regardless of sex, will be unhappy to relinquish money and power in exchange for … well, not much? If a man is passed over for promotion, subject to stagnant wages, and required to attend touchy-feely seminars in the workplace, should he really consider it an upside that he is also expected to go home and do more housework and change more diapers? That might sound like feminist nirvana, but it’s not exactly a brave new world for most men.

2) The title of the book is misleading. Rosin does address the “demise” of men, but she seems more interested in adding to the canon of literature about our new “you go girl” society and the hurdles that remain –- for women. One chapter is devoted to women’s struggle to crash through the glass ceiling, a topic we’ve all heard about once or twice: “I’m sick of hearing how far we’ve come. I’m sick of hearing how much better situated we are now than before …. The fact is that so far as leadership is concerned, women in nearly every realm are nearly nowhere.” This is the lament of a female Harvard professor. I, for one, am “sick of hearing” people who are quite privileged whine about their world not being perfect.

3) Rosin is generally fair but doesn’t always contain her female bias. A passage about highly paid professional women dropping out of the workforce is described as a “tragedy,” and the blame for this tragedy is laid squarely on evil, equally high-paid husbands. Apparently, even at the top of the economic ladder, women reserve the right to play the victim card.

4) Rosin’s prescription for men is depressing. She is not pleased with the current state of gender relations, in which many couples have a sort of Ma and Pa Kettle arrangement, with Ma running everything and Pa playing video games. Can’t blame a girl for resenting that. But, dear lord, I can’t help but feel for boys in the future, because Rosin, a mother of two boys herself, draws inspiration from this Korean woman’s child-rearing example: “Stephanie Lee is doing her part to make sure the next generation of men will make a clean break. She has taught her son to speak softly, and she buys him pink stuffed animals and enrolls him in cooking and ballet instead of tae kwan do, even if he’s the only boy in the class, even if the teachers object.” Says Lee, “He needs a more feminine side.” And I need a drink.

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

When reading this book you have to remember this is about the current trends leading to a new future.

People reviewing this negatively seem to be blinkered on the recent past.

Look at graduation rates. Almost 60% female and rising. There are more female millionaires under 40 than male. In many parts of Europe, the next generation (women in their 20s) earn more than the men.

The point is yes - not right now - but in 20 years or less, women will be the dominant force in the professional, white collar sectors.

Men will feel emasculated yes but tough. They will have to get used to doing the chores and looking after the children more.

You have to look long-term with this. And I see a 1950's style household only in reverse. Where the woman is the breadwinner and the supportive husband obeys her.

That's a future I can get behind! And Hanna Rosin has given me confidence that I will get to see a truly female-led society and workplace.

Five stars.

[H Wesselius · Rating 1 out of 5]

An endless supply of anecdotes with very little analysis. The library wanted it back before I was finished and I saw no reason to renew it.

[Fredrik deBoer · Rating 2 out of 5]

In stats and research methods, one of the easiest ways to go wrong is to consider rate of change without also considering basal rate. So, for example, if you simply say "the rate of children kidnapped by strangers increased by 50% last year!", a lot of people will freak out. But the overall rate of child kidnapping by strangers, the underlying rate, is so low that the statement is misleading; the risk of children being kidnapped by strangers is next to nothing even if it increases by 50%. (The vast, vast majority of child kidnappings are committed by family members, usually as part of a custody dispute.) Similarly, when I was in K-12 school, we were frequently told that rates of HIV infection were increasing the fastest among straight people, as a way to get us appropriately afraid of sex. What they never mentioned is that the rate of increase meant very little, considering that the rate of infection for straight people was a tiny fraction of that among gay men. This is the way that rate of change can mislead.

Well, this book is mostly that basic trick played again and again and again. Over and over, Hanna Rosin will note some metric on which women are seeing better improvement than men, giving the reader a sense that women really are winning, without appropriately referring to basal rates to indicate how far women still have to go. There are also so many artful constructions here which amount to variations on "while women still lag far behind, the rate at which they're overtaking men is...." But of course, trends continue until they stop. We can look at all manner of times in history in which social progress for a certain group has proceeded along nicely before suddenly stopping short of equality.

It's true that women have taken a lead in academics and, in certain small areas and to modest degrees, in the working world. But the overall effect of this book is to mislead, as men still maintain dominant advantages in many domains.

[Betta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wondering why you've got six Master's degrees and can't find a partner with the same amount of education? Wondering why you have such a hard time negotiating on salary (or negotiating at all?) Are you wondering if you have to change your personality to run a company? I recommend reading Ms. Rosin's extensively detailed and researched manuscript on how women's relentless pursuit of better education and financial status has affected the economic, political and social order as we know it. Can men catch up? It seems Ms. Rosin has been hammered in the press for this title and for not possessing the "research cred" to have written this. Perhaps a better title would have been "The End of Men as We Know Them" but I don't see a problem here. She's trying to be provocative. Yes, her research is mostly narrow lens focus but she doesn't claim to be a statistician. She does not claim women's state in the world has vastly improved- she rightly points out an evolving phenomenon of Flexible Woman and Cardboard Man.

[Dimity · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I heard a great deal of buzz (most of it negative) and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I'm now abandoning it for a lot of the reasons touched on in others' reviews here. The conclusions Rosin draws are almost all based on extremely small or unreliable sample sets/her personal experience. One business student at Yale doesn't speak for all young women about their attitudes towards romantic relationships. I find it rather insulting as a reader that Rosin seemingly thinks I'm stupid enough to accept her tenuous grasps at face value. I also find her assertions that women in cultures with less women than men fare better and are held at a higher esteem crazy bordering on delusional. India has been aborting female fetuses and killing female children through neglect or violence enough to create gender disparity levels far beyond natural levels and as evidenced by increasingly brutal sex crimes against women there, I can't say it seems like a great place to be female.

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. I really did but the sensationalized title and the writing itself, just no. Rosin's background is in journalism and I feel that should be taken into account when reading this book. There are major chunks of it that are just interviews. It comes off as more of a "Joe the Plumber" kind of anecdote that a politician would use rather than finding a study from say a social scientist. You can tell in sections that Rosin wanted this book to be empowering about women but also to get people thinking about what is the status of men in current society. Yes, in parts I did stop and think. However, for the most part I was thinking about how narrow Rosin's view was. The woman this book represents is a university educated woman in or close to being upper management and ignores any woman who is not. This book is just a researched editorial and very disappointing.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The End of Men and the Rise of Women, published in 2012, Hanna Rosin suggests that women tend to be “plastic,” a metaphor for flexible and adaptive, and men tend to be “cardboard,” a metaphor for rigid and lacking grit. The economy and culture have changed to advantage these plastic women relative men. Rosin calls on readers to recognize gains made by women in the workforce and the culture, and she hopes to nudge men to get with the times by becoming more plastic.

The women in these stories do seem flexible, even if it's also clear that they succeed in their careers and in their personal lives because they are aspirational, pragmatic, and diligent. Rosin reports that women are more willing than men to retrain when an industry falls out, and it seems like this is because women are willing to do work traditionally coded as both masculine and feminine. If a man loses his job in a factory, however, he seems less willing to consider working in the gig/ service economy or in a job traditionally coded as feminine. The women in these stories also seem relationally flexible. Rosin uses interviews with female university students to show they are willing to engage with the hook up culture but that they can also remove themselves from it. The men, however, are less able to adapt and instead plant themselves within their idea as a worker on the line or, more culturally, as a strong foundation for a family, or, less responsibly, as a player/ gamer/ fisher. These men may feel like a rock, unmovable, but it was hard to dispute Rosin’s claim that they are cardboard--inflexible and falling behind.

The title is a provocation, which I dislike, and it invites readers to object to it as an overstatement. Many of her statistics suggest balance rather than dominance and the "end of men" is best seen in university enrolment. Rosin reports that universities are struggling to maintain a 60:40 ratio of women to men because the males are so far behind. When it comes to the workforce, much of the progress reported here is contained to a few fields, and most of them are ones traditionally coded as feminine. In Women and Power, Mary Beard argues that men still outnumber women at elite corporate positions and in positions of political power, and I’d further be curious to know what amount of wealth women control relative to men. Rosin is bullish, arguing that women make progress every year, a bit at a time, and that they have already made more progress than is commonly realized.

I wonder how the book is aging. It could be taken as evidence interpreting "what happened" as backlash, so maybe its reporting has become more powerful. Then again, some of Rosin's reporting on women working in finance and in Silicon Valley in the post #MeToo era has not aged well. She reports on male coworkers who have pornography on their phones, which they play in the office and in office outings. The women in these offices passively ignore and endure such provocations. Rosin also reports on women who work in Silicon Valley who grit their teeth in the face of sexist slights. Then again, I wonder if Rosin would today interpret #MeToo as continued progress made by women.

Ultimately, I view The End of Men as a poorly titled book with interesting reporting. (It's not the first interesting book I've read with a bad title and it won't be the last.) If nothing else, I finished the book thinking "am I too cardboard?" and was also left more convinced that women endure a lot of sexist bullshit.

[Heather Fryling · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing. Hanna Rosin identifies important threads of improvement in womens' lives, then somehow weaves them into a story of a power hungry, emasculating matriarchal takeover of... the whole world! The facts, and even her own examples, do not support her view.
Here's one instance. Throughout the book, she likes to remind us that single, childless women under thirty make more money, on average, than single, childless men under thirty. This is a misleading statistic, because it's a comparison between highly educated, professional women and blue collar men, the subgroups most likely to make up the unmarried and childless portion of the population. Rosin's own writing hints at this situation when, in the chapter on Asia, she notes that men are too intimidated to marry highly successful women, and women don't marry men too far below them. This creates a surplus of women at the top of the dating pool and a surplus of men at the bottom. Among men and women matched for education and skill set, men continue to out earn women. Does an equally skilled women making less than a man for the same work really look like female dominance?
Rosin might argue that the rise of women, however inevitable, isn't fully accomplished yet. Younger women are going to college more often than younger men, so sooner or later, women will reverse the discrimination that holds them back.
That may be true eventually, but it very well may not be. Stephanie Coontz, in her New York Times article, "The Myth of Male Decline," makes a convincing, facts-based argument that female "superiority" is not the slam dunk juggernaut Rosin describes. Women have made gains, and blue collar men have suffered losses, but sexism is still alive and well.
The End of Men aside, there is no good reason to assume that blue collar men can't adapt to the new economy. Yes, machismo currently holds these men back from education, but who's to say that won't change? Rosin argues that women are plastic, adjusting to new opportunities, while men are cardboard, rigid, fragile, and incapable of growth.
Do men really have to be cardboard, or can men plastic too? Rosin spends most of the book assuming no, but in her conclusion suddenly admits the possibility. It turns out her prototypical cardboard man, the one who'd inspired the entire book, turned plastic. He went back to school to become a nurse. If men turn plastic, Rosin's predictions fall apart. The End of Men may not be such a done deal after all.

[Catherine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Less provocative than the title sounds, this book outlines strides made by women in education, careers, and earnings power, and how this is changing marriage and society.

Short shrift was given to the disparity of women as CEOs and in politics. The author first cites that fewer than 6% of Fortune-500 CEOs, only 17% of congress, and 20 out of 180 heads of state are women, but then goes on to describe this as “the last gasp of a vanishing age.” I know things take time, but this seems far from a last gasp.

There were interviews with women who have used their financial status to avoid settling for disadvantageous relationships or circumstances, as well as some who are in relationships with reasonable equality. But the tales that made the greatest impression on me were of households with sole financial support from the wife, and husbands who are willing to assume the stay-at-home role, but refuse to take on many household tasks. The most horrifying example was the husband who has stipulated that he won’t deal with dirty diapers and leaves them in the sink (!) for his wife to take care of when she gets home. This, along with the author glossing over types of careers that have barely evolved, left me with the feeling that inequality is still far more prevalent. 2.5 stars.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

This made me really frustrated. I could not get through it, and am sick of journalists using case studies to generalize to the population level. It makes very little sense.

[Safia AlSharji · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh yes!! This book demands a deep discussion with friends. The author, Henna Rosin, argues that women are successfully adapted to the new economic reality of the 21st century. You will be surprised by the statistics this book shows regarding this topic and related ones! After reading The End of Men, I wish that someone could write about the similar articles in the Middle East society to find the solutions to fill the missing gaps.

[Brittany · Rating 3 out of 5]

I distinctly remember this book coming out when I was in university. I had gone to the book store to look around before going to see a movie on a prized weekend, and it was all over the non-fiction stand. Now, only a short seven years later, I have finally read it lol.

Overall, I don't really have much to say. This book isn't bad, but it isn't good. It's not particularly compelling, but it isn't boring. It's not new, but it's not old. It's just very...middle-rung.

"The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people." - Patricia Cornwell

[Anne Bogel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was born from a sensational piece in The Atlantic--a common route to publishing! And as it so often goes, the book is far more thoughtful and less sensational than the magazine article.

I heard Rosin speak back in the fall and was impressed by her insights, and found the book to be thought-provoking and compelling.

Rosin offers a somewhat contrarian take on where the genders stand today. She examines hook-up culture, educational trends, and the growing chasm between the upper middle class and the rest of America. My favorite chapter was on the "see-saw marriage;" I did skip the chapter on increasingly female violence entirely.

If this topic interests you, Rosin's book is a worthwhile read.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book really isn't about the end of men at all but I will forgive them for needing to sell books through a dramatic title. The book is really a dissection of the changing gender roles in modern society. I found it totally fascinating, despite the fact that it's really hard to make generalizations about such big topics. The most interesting part to me is the way that Rosin lays out how, along with increasing income inequality, we also have an increasing cultural divide between upper and lower class segments of society in terms of trends around marriage, childrearing, education, etc. - a trend that does not bode well for our nation.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Also posted at Feminist Mormon Housewives.

THE END OF MEN the book cover blares ominously. It’s a deliberately provocative title, followed by an equally provocative first chapter (in which women hook up for business and pleasure). This strategy may draw attention and sell books, but most of the people I know will never get past that first in-your-face chapter. This is unfortunate since this book raises numerous topics worthy of discussion.

Topic the First: That title!
The overarching theme of this book is that world is changing, and that new world isn’t too friendly to rigid gender roles.

“At some point in the last forty years,” Rosin writes, “the job market became largely indifferent to size and strength, and from then on, in many pockets of the workforce, men no longer held the cards…The coveted and lasting professions were the ones that required a boutique skill or a nurturing touch — things a robot could not easily do. Traditionally feminine attributes like empathy, patience, and communal problem-solving, began to replace the top-down autocratic model of leadership and success. For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men.” (p. 117-118)

Rosin discusses how this shift in the marketplace is impacting men (and women). It’s not a simple story to tell. So much depends on one’s status to start with. In the lower class, men who planned on following their fathers and their fathers’ fathers into the factory or the mines are left unemployed and rudderless, leading many women to decide that marrying those men would just add another burden to their already difficult lives. In the middle class, the rigid gender roles are blurring. Women can be the major breadwinner; men can do more carpooling and housework. Men and women are becoming more equal partners in marriage and parenting.

Does this signal (cue ominous music) the end of men? Of course not, only the end of stereotypical men.

Topic the Second: Yay for Women!
Overall, this is good news for women. The marketplace is opening up to women and women are taking advantage of it. Women are earning almost 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees and about 44 percent of all business degrees (p.150). As women focus on education, they delay marriage and children. This, combined with that education, allows women to find better jobs. Financial independence gives them more power and the means to leave abusive relationships. As women move into leadership roles, they are also making the workplace more friendly to flexible schedules and parenthood.

This is not to say that all women must work full-time. Rosin envisions a world where spouses’ roles are fluid. Sometimes the man is the main breadwinner, sometimes the woman. Maybe sometimes, both work part-time. Both share in parenting which Rosin shows statistically to be beneficial to children.

Like so many things, these changes are a double-edged sword. As women have moved into the workforce (yay), she often does not cede her domestic tasks, but only doubles her load (boo). We may not have to be the “nice girl” anymore (yay), but there has been a marked rise in female violence (boo). Women are moving up (yay) but it seems like men are stumbling down (boo). Which leads me to my next point…

Topic the Third: Those Poor Men
Allow me to bombard you with quotes:

“The women take on new roles with gusto, while the men take them on only reluctantly.” (p.76)

“The list of working-class jobs predicted to grow is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proven remarkably unable to adapt…The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men…still shy away from some careers as women begin to dominate them.” (p. 124-125)

“…Every year, tens of thousands more women then men graduate from college…‘One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,’ says Tom Mortensen, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. ‘But they are just failing to adapt.’” (p. 149-150)

Those poor, poor men, unable to adapt to this brave, new world. Is this true? Rosin is skillful in making her case; it rang true as I read it, but it simply doesn’t feel right to replace one stereotype (macho man) with another (inflexible man).

Topic the Fourth: A Few Reservations
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Rosin also touches on brain research and stay-at-home dads, that “hook-up culture” and much, much more. However, the book should be approached with some caution:

* Rosin relies heavily on anecdotal evidence, which, while interesting, may not be indicative of the big picture. For example, in the chapter about hook-ups, Rosin interviews numerous women about their promiscuous lifestyles, only to admit on page 24 that the hook-up culture may not be widespread (college seniors report a median of 5 hook-ups over 4 years; most women are not taking random strangers home every Friday night). However, I’m willing to bet that the salacious stories will leave more of an impression than the actual data.

* As always, statistics can be complicated. For one thing, some of the data used was collected rather unscientifically. An example: Rosin conducted a survey of 7500 female-breadwinner couples through the online magazine Slate (p. 51-52). This survey found that 80% of respondents described themselves as happy in the marriage, rating themselves as having a fairly low chance of divorcing. While she briefly acknowledges some of the problems inherent in her data (respondents were mainly women, and readers of Slate tend to be far more educated than the general population), Rosin doesn’t acknowledge just how much they might skew her results. Without a significant response from men, can one really say that 80% of those marriages are happy? Would men actually admit to being intimidated by their bread-winnning wives? How would the results be different if surveying less educated individuals?

* The book has been criticized for not discussing women in politics. I agree that this is an important topic when discussing the future of men and women.

In the end, this book, while interesting, left me with the uneasy feeling that it's just not quite accurate. I'm not sure if it's truly inaccurate, or if life here in Idaho is behind the times, or if I just don't like the picture Rosin is painting (I don't want men or women to do poorly!). At any rate, it raises topics well worth pondering.

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I enjoyed this book in a pop psychology way. It's failings mainly surround the lack of social structures/gendered interrogation into why men are slipping behind. It don't believe its as simplistic as women can juggle more things than men or that the new fields of work require more soft skills. Yes this is a reason but I think a more nuanced interrogation would unearth that men have simply not been *required* to develop these skills because it's been the assumption that women will provide these services to them. Men have had no reason to believe that their lives would change so substantially, that they wouldn't continue to live like little princes when women have had to work, take care of the family and do the lions share of the housework. Social conditioning has made men weak and inflexible to the new reality where women have always had their security on the back of their minds. Again I feel I'm also all thumbs in trying to describe this but overall I think the book really did highlight something that I've been weaving together. Especially around birth rate decline - when we see women given access to education and effective birth control we are seeing the birth rate declining. The studies and research cherry picked for statistics are strange.. and hung together ham fistedly. But Rosin is an engaging writer and I breezed through this in a few days. A sociology PHD thesis this is not but is a read that will make you think about a lot of things.

[Susy Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure I would have read this book on my own volition. The author is coming to speak at the university where I work, so I read it in preparation to understand her presentation. It is an interesting concept that she has. I agree with some points and am intrigued with other points. I am also amazed by how some cultures are very slow to change; IE Korean.

I will say that I was both terrified and relieved after reading this book. Terrified that my daughter is going off to college (after chapter 1 on single girls mastering the hook-up culture) and relieved that my son just graduated from college (after chapter 5 on the education gap). Not sure these two feelings balance each other out, they just make me drink more wine!

I found it interesting in the afterward how she explains why some women can't call themselves feminists. I'm not sure that is me exactly, but I also would not have called myself a feminist. But I do want to see men and women treated equal, when appropriate. I also feel there are physical differences between the two.

My early self could have stood to learn a lot from this book, but twenty years of trying to survive in a male dominated company and learning lessons the hard way also provided a life shift for me, on my terms. So while I appreciate all I did and had for those twenty years, I am also eternally grateful that I have a second career that I want and that makes me happy even if isn't as lucrative as the one I once had. Who knows what my third career may be after reading this...

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started off reading this book, like "yeah! Men are over!" but the more I read, the more depressed I became. So many of the women featured in this book about how the workplace has changed, just work so damn much! I really don't want a world where the solution to everything is just working more. I can admire how women are working better paying jobs AND still taking care of the kids, but it just seems terrible to have no time at all to yourself. I already think 40 hours a week is too much, but I would be labelled as one of the unambitious women who just need to "get over it." (In all fairness, not Hanna Rosin's words - probably Sheryl Sandberg)