‘So now that women don’t need men to reproduce and refinance, the question is, will we keep you around? And the answer is, ‘You know we need you in the way we need ice cream — you’ll be more ornamental.’ ’ Maureen Dowd New York Times columnist

When Caitlin Moran scans the faces of 2,700-some attendees at the Munk Debates Friday Nov. 15, what will she see?

Will she observe a surfeit of women of a certain age who, as she once wrote, sport tight, shiny foreheads and lips that, illogically, puff upward and outward and whose eyes appear to have been pinned wide open “as if they were in Harley Street and have just been given the final bill for it all”?

Will she be as tart and engaging (and fantastically profane) as her writing?

In addition, might she spy any, er, men?

Men would be good.

Moran, a columnist with the Times of London, will be appearing alongside the Amazonian Camille Paglia arguing against the stunt line resolution: Be it resolved, men are obsolete.

Arguing for the resolution will be Hanna Rosin, Atlantic magazine editor and author of, helpfully, The End of Men. Helping Rosin along will be crackerjack New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who has also written about men in her less conclusive Are Men Necessary?

(Dowd ends the book by posing that very question, which seems a cheap and unsatisfying trick.)

The thesis of the Munk resolution can be distilled thusly: Women are “fast emerging” as the “more successful sex of the species.”

As none of the four debaters is Canadian, it might be helpful to contextualize the local scene, give them some advance tips, as it were:

The semiannual Munk Debates are an initiative of the Aurea Foundation, founded by gold baron Peter Munk and his wife, Melanie. So here’s a consideration: The board of Munk’s Barrick Gold Corp. is constituted of 13 directors. Twelve are men. A lone woman, economist Dambisa Moyo, joined the board in 2011. The year prior, the board’s 14 slots, each and every one, were taken by men.

It’s not for me to say how many Barrick directors are of the good-ol’-boy ilk (read, toadies). But I will say that even the argument that “resources” companies are more naturally the purview of men can’t explain why the Barrick board remains, in situ, in the Eighties. (Newmont, the world’s second largest gold company after Barrick, has a 10-person board; three are women.)

The debaters need to know this, specifically and broadly. A report last March from the economics group at the Toronto-Dominion Bank came up with this stat: “nearly three-quarters of the corporations on the S&P/TSX Composite Index either do not have a single woman on their board or just one female member.” Forty-three per cent have no women at all. Not one.

You see, this is the issue. As soon as one starts to peel the onion on the thesis, it gets all statistic-y, as Moran might say. All data-set-y.

Will Rosin, an American, return to her 2010 Atlantic essay in which she crowed that women now hold a majority of U.S. jobs? (The resulting End of Men book is just out in paperback.)

The Canadian view: Two decades ago, women in this country represented 40 per cent of workers with full-time employment. Last year it was 43 per cent, slightly below where we were in 2007.

So it’s less of a fast emergence and more of a slow ascent to, hmm, here’s a thought, equality. Dowd reflected upon this in her book. Perhaps bonobos, also known as gracile chimpanzees, could serve as a societal role model, she posited, for the females exhibit a “light” (read sexual) dominance “so that it is more like a co-dominance, or equality between the sexes.”

Not the end of men. But that lovely word, egalitarianism.

Gracile, by the way, means shapely. How lovely is that?

Humanwise, where are we seeing seismic action? Rosin reports that in the U.S. three women earn a Bachelor of Arts degree for every two men. In Ontario in 2001, women were awarded 59 per cent of all degrees. A decade later, women were awarded 60 per cent of all degrees. The awarding of bachelors to women also rose a single percent across a 10-year span, to 61 per cent. Masters degrees, however, rose by a relatively plump 4 per cent to 55.7.

Not quite enough to start yelling: “It’s over for you men!”

Engineering remains predominantly male: more than three to one at the bachelor’s level. Social science remains predominantly female, at two to one.

At the University of Toronto, women broke above the 20 per cent mark in engineering degrees awarded at a bachelor’s level — in 1995. Last year, women took 23.6 per cent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering. So less revolution and more evolution.

At York University’s Schulich School of Business, 36 per cent of total enrollment last year was made up of women. A decade earlier, in 2001, that number stood at 39 per cent.

In The End of Men, Rosin does give a nod toward some unassailable facts. “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,” she writes. “But given the sheer velocity of the economic and other forces at work, these circumstances are much more likely the last artifacts of a vanishing age than a permanent configuration.”

In other words, see the big picture, feel the momentum, don’t get mucked up by data plucked in a “selective sort of way that elides other truths.”

True, a packed audience at Roy Thomson Hall isn’t likely to experience the rapture if the speakers get bogged down in percentages and demographic anomalies and part-time versus full-time work and social inequality and whether by “workforce” we really don’t mean “labour force.” Etcetera.

Much more entertaining to draw generalized conclusions, as Rosin does when she asserts that “feminist progress is largely dependent on hook-up culture.”

Today, Tinder. Tomorrow, the CEO’s job?

One thinks not. (Dear editor: Tinder is a hook-up app.)

Perhaps there will be a science-y side to the debate. Sperm selection. Girls over boys. I note the blurb for Maureen Dowd on the Munk website: “So now that women don’t need men to reproduce and refinance, the question is, will we keep you around?” Dowd asks. “And the answer is, ‘You know we need you in the way we need ice cream — you’ll be more ornamental.’ ”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

This is confusing as ice cream is, of course, one of the primary food groups. And if you try to deal with ice cream in an ornamental way, you are bound to be disappointed by the outcome.

The “F” word is bound to come up. In her best-selling How to be a Woman, Moran offers perhaps the most trenchant tip for women who may be confused as to whether the feminist label applies to them.

“Put your hand in your underpants. a. Do you have a vagina? B. Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.”

Two weeks ago, in her column for the Times, Moran pondered the big question: how will women know when they have become equal to men?

Point one: wage parity.

On that point, can we compare the speaking fee that Morin will draw as against her Brit compatriot, Tony Blair, who argued, unsuccessfully as it turns out, that religion is a force of good in the world? (Christopher Hitchens won that smackdown.) Or what sum Rosin will draw for her appearance as measured beside, say, Henry Kissinger, who argued against the proposition that the 21st century will belong to China? (Kissinger and the cons won big that night.)

Munk Debates moderator Rudyard Griffiths says speaking fees are not disclosed. He then delightfully volunteers that Blair and Kissinger were “an example of the more avarice end of the speaking spectrum.”

But, still, are the women catching up? Are their speaking fees feeling the velocity? We can’t know.

Number two on Moran’s list is to see an equal number of female CEOs on the Forbes 100 list. “Current score: 2. Out of 100.”

Number four is the very reasonable assertion that women should be able to “eat a sausage for breakfast when they fancy it, without feeling badly about it and banging on about it for the rest of the day.”

(Moran has also pondered this question: Why is it that when men screw up, they screw up? When women screw up, it’s a cultural signifier.)

This may seem terribly confusing, because if women are not, yet, equal to them, how can men be obsolete?

Perhaps this is what pre-debate voters are thinking when they go to the Munk Debates website to vote against the resolution, thereby throwing their weight behind Moran and Paglia.

This is a case of be careful what you wish for. The winning team is the team that moves the public opinion needle the most. At last check, the cons were screaming ahead at 76 per cent, with the pros at 17 per cent and the rest undecided. It may be, as Griffiths suggests, that Dowd and Rosin will only have to peel a percent or two of support from Paglia and Moran to be declared the victor. To appropriate a Dowd end-of-men phrase: “They’re doomed, poor darlings.”

Did I mention that tickets sold out in 48 hours? Only the Hitchens-Blair matchup was a faster sell. (The debate is streamed live online.) Response has been so enthusiastic, organizers have teed up authors Christina Hoff Sommers and Stephanie Coontz for a post-debate online town hall.

It was Coontz who took Rosin and her brethren to task in the New York Times in September 2012, arguing that End of Men and other treatises like it “reflect, but exaggerate, a transformation in the distribution of power over the past half-century.” On the question of wages, Coontz offered this: “What we are seeing is a convergence of economic fortunes, not female ascendance.”

That sounds about right.

And should it come to pass, what will distinguish the men from the women?

I think Moran might say, “Botox.”

How odd she finds it that just as women push through to their 30s and beyond, when their faces and figures display the signs of entering the “zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards,” they go on to erase those very same signs. Thus, she concludes, giving the impression “that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you.”

As Moran gazes upon the crowd, Friday night next, she may well wonder who in the crowd is saddened by the debate’s outcome.

Only one question remains: Will she be able to tell?