Women: The happiness gap

last updated 8 January 2015

By virtually every measure, American women are better off today than they were 30 years ago, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. They are “wealthier, healthier, and better educated,” they can leave abusive husbands and sue sexist bosses, and they enjoy “unprecedented control over their own fertility.” And yet, a new study by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that over the past few decades, women’s self-reported happiness has actually decreased, “both absolutely and relative to men.” Is the culprit the decline of the two-parent family and traditional sexual mores? Or is it the famous “second shift,” in which women still do most of the housework even as they work outside the home? Whatever the explanation, the reality is that the feminist revolution has “delivered women to greater unhappiness.”

Here we go again—another debate about feminism, said Elizabeth Debold in Huffingtonpost.com. Conservatives, of course, couldn’t wait to proclaim the new study as proof that women “were better off in their traditional at-home roles.” Just as predictably, progressives insisted that the blame rests with “institutions and customs that have not changed enough.” But given the profound changes in gender roles in recent decades, the results of this study aren’t surprising. Think about it. For thousands of years, biology determined women’s “value and identity,” and our only important role was to bear and raise children. Almost overnight, feminism and modern contraception freed women to choose how to live our lives, with a dozen possible options. It’s understandable that we would feel “unmoored” as we navigate choices available “for the first time in femaledom.”

You certainly won’t find many women who wish they were still “barefoot in the kitchen,” said Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail. But today, “expectations are so much higher.” Now that women have been “liberated to compete with everyone, we compete with all the guys for the next promotion, with Angelina Jolie to look really sexy, with every other mom to be the perfect parent, and with Mother Teresa to be compassionate and good.” It’s hard to be happy when you’re always coming up short. Then again, the real problem might simply be that women tend to brood and think too much. “Maybe the cavewomen gazed across the roasting mastodon at their mates 50,000 years ago and wondered, Is that all? Maybe we have always wondered that. It’s just that now, we feel free to say it out loud.”