Woman, Be Happier!

Read Are Women Less Happy Than Men? part 1 here.

Last week I introduced a study that claims that women on average are becoming progressively less happy over time, and are less happy than men. Here are links to other sites that have commented on that study and its results.

Please chime in with your own comments and opinions on the study, on your own happiness, and on what you think would make you happier than you already are.

Opinions on the Wolfers and Stevens Study on the Declining Happiness of Women

David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt in a New York Times article in 2007, which also mentions a second study about time spent on unpleasant activities.

Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.

Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.

Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham in The Huffington Post.

Imagine it is 1969 and we’re in a thriving American city. Let’s choose Detroit. The ’60s were good to the Motor City, and the future would have looked bright as new chrome. Now, imagine stopping a working woman on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue, perhaps a young bank clerk, and asking if she would cast her mind forward, decades into the future. Not to picture the flying cars and space-themed restaurants that always seem to pop up in visions of the future, but to think about the role of women at work, in business, in government, in life. What do you think she would have said?

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Yet the biggest surprise would have come if you had asked her just one more question. Given all the evidence of women running corporations and universities, hospitals, media empires, branches of government, army divisions, and countries, do you think women in the future will be happier?

Of course they will be happier, she would have said. With all these opportunities and achievements, how could they not be?

Well, as it turns out, too easily.

Meghan Cox Gurdon

Meghan Cox Gurdon, in a Washington Examiner opinion column

The anecdotal experience of millions, along with the analysis by women such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Mary Eberstadt, Danielle Crittenden, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and Kay Hymowitz, all confirm what the Wharton academics discovered: Far from enhancing the lives of modern women, in many respects the feminist movement has diminished women’s happiness and satisfaction.

Allison Martell

Allison Martell on her blog, Economicwoman.com

Just in case you’ve been living in a cave: Stevenson and Wolfers find that women’s happiness, in total and compared to men, has been declining steadily since the 1970s. Women, on average, used to be slightly happier than men, and now, on average, they are slightly less happy than men. (Slightly is a key word here, and we’ll return to that.) The researchers look at a few different studies, but most of their results are from the General Social Survey, based on a simple question about subjective well-being: “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?”

This is not a fluffy trend piece, though it has inspired a lot of fluffy trend pieces. I only have an undergraduate degree in economics, but I’ve read my fair share of econometric papers, in and out of class – I’m reasonably familiar with all the methods used in the paper – and Stevenson and Wolfers’ work does not look like statistical sleight-of-hand to me. The trend is real, but whether it is big enough to worry about is a more complicated question.

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd, in a New York Times opinion column.

Women are getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl.

“How can you tell?” he deadpanned. “It’s always been whine-whine-whine.”

Why are we sadder? I persisted.

“Because you care,” he replied with a mock sneer. “You have feelings.”

Oh, that.

In the early ’70s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold.

But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich, in Guernica.

What this study shows, if anything, is that neither marriage nor children make women happy. (The results are not in yet on nipple piercing.) Nor, for that matter, does there seem to be any problem with “too many choices,” “work-life balance,” or the “second shift.” If you believe Stevenson and Wolfers, women’s happiness is supremely indifferent to the actual conditions of their lives, including poverty and racial discrimination. Whatever “happiness” is…

So What Do YOU Think?

Please comment about your own happiness, whether you think it is going up or down, how you know if you are happy, and what would make you happier than you are now.

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