Hitting the play button, you can see that in the 1970s, male students outnumbered female ones in most countries; by 2050, the demographers project, the reverse will occur and we will be looking at a world where women are better educated than men.

Esteve and colleagues also published a major paper showing that globally, the marital pattern that held true for generations--women marrying men with more education—has begun to reverse and women are marrying men with less schooling. This, they point out, will have an effect on who does the earning in marriage. As more women become breadwinners, Esteve says, it's necessary for scholars to begin to study how everything else—housework, divorce, childbearing—is affected.

I wrote about these trends in a book, The Richer Sex, which was published in March. In it, I argued that female breadwinning could someday become the norm. In this country, as in many others, the rise in wives' earnings relative to husband's is striking. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of working wives who out-earn their husbands has ticked steadily upward, from 23.7 percent in 1987 to 38.3 percent in 2010. It stagnated in the 1990s but began accelerating around 2000. There was a big jump in 2009, no doubt the result of a recession that cost more male jobs than female ones, but even after the recession formally ended, the percentage continued to rise. If you plot this rise in a linear graph, you can see that if the trend continues, the percentage of working wives who are primary earners would cross 50 in about 2036.

This does not include the large and growing number of single mothers (40 percent of children are born to unmarried women) many of whom are, by default, breadwinners.

When I was making the argument, I knew it would be controversial and that reasonable people would disagree. Still, it seems a point well worth pushing, given the changes that are clearly taking place in terms of women's achievements. I was careful to include the important caveats: There is still a gender wage gap—women overall make less, on average, working full-time, than men. This means that even when women are the richer sex, compared to their husbands and boyfriends—something that can powerfully affect relationship dynamics—they still may not be earning as much as they in fairness should. Discrimination still exists, and there are experts who believing women's earnings will always be depressed by childbearing. But the trends are unmistakable, the numbers arresting. Something is going on, in marriage. Something is happening.

I welcomed discussion, but what's been interesting to see that the only pushback has come from a feminist academic establishment that you'd think would be happy or at least intrigued by what's going on. Instead, responding to my book as well as Hanna Rosin's The End of Men, a number of feminists have argued that the female-breadwinning trend is not occurring or is minimally important. These voices— Evergreen State College's Stephanie Coontz, Nancy Folbre at UMass Amherst, University of Maryland's Philip Cohen—are part a feminist establishment that I deeply respect, but which I confess I have begun to think of as the Fempire, a group that includes some women's rights advocates and academics employed in those very institutions that are becoming predominately female. They point to the gender wage gap, as though it had not been mentioned. They insist that if you are calculating female breadwinners you must take into account non-employed wives, in order to get the number lower. It's fine to do that—the Fempire, I have noticed, prefers to use statistics that are least favorable to signs of women's progress—but if you're going to do that, you should also add in single moms, whose numbers counterbalance the stay-at-home ones. Whichever way you want to define them, the ranks of women breadwinners are getting larger. Sure, all this could halt tomorrow, or next year, but to paraphrase the Magic Eight Ball: All signs point to up. Does the Fempire think that all these educated women are not, in the end, going to have an impact?