Are Women Less Happy Than Men? part 1
Read Are Women Less Happy Than Men? part 2 here.
Do you think women’s happiness is declining? What about your own? Are you getting more or less happy? A 2009 study found that women are less happy than men, and less happy in 2006 than they were in 1972, across differences in income, education and nationality. Why is this happening? And what are we going to do about it?
I want to know what you think about your own happiness, and if the results of this study are true, then I want to know what we can do about it to reverse the negative trend. Or maybe we can only affect our own individual happiness, so how can we make ourselves happier? Please add your opinion in a comment, and see part 2 next week which will review some of the comments that have appeared around the web.
Find Out What the Study Said
The study is called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” by Wolfers and Stevens. It is a meta-analysis of data collected in different studies over time, and primarily from one survey that was conducted annually in the United States.
A sample of the U.S. population was asked, “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days, would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” How would you answer this question? Do you think this is a good way to measure and compare happiness? How can you tell if you are happier or less happy than you were in the past?
The authors of the study point out that women’s opportunities have increased over the decades in question, and that most women believe that women are better off now than they were in 1972, but these improvements do not translate into an equivalent increase in perceived happiness. They then continue, on p. 2:
Given these shifts of rights and bargaining power from men to women over the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness toward women and away from men. Yet, in this paper, we document that measures of women’s subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively to that of men. While the expansion in women’s opportunities has been extensively studied, the concurrent decline in subjective well-being has largely gone unnoted. One exception to this is David G. Blanchfower and Andrew J. Oswald (2004), who study trends in happiness in the United States and Britain noting that, while women report being happier than men over the period that they examine, the trend in white women’s happiness in the United States is negative over the period. We will show, in this paper, that women’s happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men’s in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier than men, and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men. Moreover, we show that this shift has occurred through much of the industrialized world.
So What Do the Results Mean?
The study reveals a trend of a decline in happiness among women in the United States, overall and relative to men, and then breaks down the data to analyze it by different demographic groups. It is further compared to data on women’s happiness for Europe, and across the domains of marriage, work, health and finances. P. 4 states:
To preview our fndings, Section I shows that women in the United States have become less happy, both absolutely and relative to men. Women have traditionally reported higher levels of happiness than men, but they are now reporting happiness levels that are similar or even lower than those of men. The relative decline in well-being holds across various datasets, and holds whether one asks about happiness or life satisfaction. In Section II, we explore these trends by demographic group, fnding that the relative decline in women’s well-being is ubiquitous, and holds for both working and stay-at-home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across the education distribution. While compositional shifts in these groups make it diffcult to interpret trends for each group, the fact that we fnd similar trends across groups leaves little doubt that the decline in female happiness is widespread and cannot be attributed easily to one social phenomenon. For example, decreases in happiness arising due to the “second shift” should impact working mothers more than others. Similarly, declines in happiness stemming from the challenges of single-parenthood should have greater impact on nonwhite women and white women with less education. Yet, we fnd no evidence of such differential changes in reported well-being.
What could all this mean? The authors of this study do not attempt to explain the reason or reasons for the decline of women’s happiness, other than to point out that their data does not support an obvious explanation. I am less interested in the answer to this question for all women than in what it means for you and for me, in our own lives.
Please comment on how happy you are, whether you are getting happier or less happy, and how you know. *singing* “If you’re happy and you know it, write a comment…” If you’re not happy, then why not, and what would make you happy?
Next week, part 2 will have links to opinions on this study from around the web. Subscribe by email on the upper right of this page to get an email alert when new articles are published, about three times per week.
