Finally, Rosin says, women are just more "together" than their male counterparts. They have more ambitious visions for their lives, whether those visions include education or career, or doing both while also raising children. Rosin profiles a number of couples in which the woman is the go-getter who's gone back to school, or the breadwinner who also bears most of the brunt of childcare. While the guys watch Tosh.0, the women watch documentaries. The men see their professional opportunities dry up and make no plans to replace them, while the women study hard at pharmacy school and laugh about joining the "109 Club," so named for the six-figure salary they'll soon be making in the now female-dominated field of pharmacy.

This is the view from above, the long view. Statistically speaking, when it comes to work and money at least, women are doing better than ever before, and it looks as though that trend will continue. On the ground, though, the view looks very different. While the long view is crucial, so too is the everyday lived experience of young American women. And there are a lot of young American women whose boats aren't being lifted with women's rising tide. The gender wage gap is closing more slowly for women of color than it is for white women. Lesbians and bisexual women are still at greater risk of poor health outcomes and chronic health conditions like obesity and mental illness. Even the women who are recipients of the progress that Rosin investigates don't feel like they, or their gender team, is "winning."

It's hard to bear that dramatic drop in sexual violence in mind when you're harassed five times between your front door and the bus stop. If you're a college student punishing yourself for dinner with an extra-long, extra hard session at the gym, it's a struggle to remember that self-esteem boom, especially when you look around and see half a dozen of your classmates doing exactly the same thing. And when you go to work in the morning (assuming you can find a job, of course) it's difficult to feel triumphant about that view from above when you're wondering if your male co-workers are being paid more than you are for doing exactly the same job, which is highly likely when the gender wage gap still holds at about 78 percent. Again, the statistics tell an important story, but they don't tell the whole story.

If you want a view from the ground, Girls provides one.

Dunham's series has been criticized for its lack of melanin and for its privilege-blind vision of genteel and gentrifying poverty. While those criticisms are justified, Girls fills in some of the blanks left by Rosin's reporting, and gives us a fuller picture of what it might mean to be a young American woman in the age of the end of men.

Dunham's Hannah and her friends are women, but they are not taking over the world. They're floundering. Hannah, despite having a degree from a prestigious liberal arts school, struggles to find paid work. When she does, she is sexually harassed by her boss. Jessa is working as a nanny, and she quits when her boss tries to get into her pants. Despite the demographic shifts that are happening around them, Hannah and Jessa don't exactly feel like they're a part of the rise of women. All the girls in Girls have ambition, but they don't have the tenacity and follow-through that Rosin sees in the women she writes about. They're certainly not more "together" than the men in their lives. Hannah's roommate Marnie still gets financial help from her parents, while Marnie's boyfriend Charlie is self-sufficient. Hannah is as far from "together" as it gets. She marinates in self-doubt, self-loathing, and often self-pity.