According to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the University of Pennsylvania published in May 2009 women are feeling less good about themselves and their lives. The title of the study is “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” The authors of the research, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers write, “By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men.”
Women’s Well-being Tracked for Thirty Years
The researchers carried out their study across cultural, socioeconomic, and ethnic groups in several industrialized countries.
Similar research was carried out in the 1970s and women were cheerier back then.
Stevenson and Wolfers write that, “The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries.”
Women used to be generally happier than men, now a “new gender gap is emerging - one with higher subjective well-being for men.”
Theories for Women’s Unhappiness
The authors advance a couple of reasons for why women have the blues but they don’t pick any one as the cause:
- The women’s movement raised hopes and failed to deliver: “As women’s expectations move into alignment with their experiences, this decline in happiness may reverse.”
- The demands on working mothers are crushing, but the authors cast “doubt on the hypothesis that trends in marriage and divorce, single parenthood or work/family balance are at the root of the happiness declines among women.”
Newspaper Columnists have Their Own Ideas
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat went along with feminism-failed-us-notion. In his article “Liberated and Unhappy,” (May 25, 2009) he also blames society in general: “the structures of American society don’t make enough allowances for the particular challenges of motherhood. We can squabble forever about the choices that mothers ought to make, but the difficult work-parenthood juggle is here to stay.” He suggests, among other things, a more family-friendly tax code.
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Meghan Daum thinks women being grumpier can be tied into celebrity-worshipping culture. In her article “Why aren’t Women Happy? Who Knows?” she wrote, “when I first heard about the study, I immediately had a scapegoat too: Angelina Jolie. Her entire Oscar-winning, serial-adopting, Brad Pitt-snagging, plane-piloting, unattainably hot-looking existence makes women around the world feel hopelessly inadequate and therefore unhappy. I mean, duh.”
Whatever the reasons for feeling down in the dumps getting a handle on the problem might be a good idea, because as the sign on the walls of millions of kitchens says: “If Momma Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy.”
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