As much as I like to gripe about how much easier it was for my parents to afford stuff (like a mortgage, property, health care, and most importantly, a baby) when they were my age, I’ve never actually wanted to trade places with them. Even if I had a time machine (or a ticket for LOST's Ajira Airways flight 316), I wouldn’t want to transport myself back to the sexist seventies, when women still hadn’t gotten a foot in the door--never mind broken the ceiling--in most industries, when women still shouldered the overwhelming bulk of housework and child-raising and when family-minded moms like mine still believed that they had only two viable career options: teacher or nurse. As a loud n’ proud feminist, I’m hyper-aware and hyper-appreciative of how far we’ve come since then, and how there’s never been a better time to be a woman. I always assumed that regardless of how stressful and overwhelming my life seems now, things are still a helluva lot better than they were thirty-five years ago, and as a result, I’m probably a helluva lot happier than those women who came before me.
Well, according to a paper from two economists at the University of Pennsylvania, while a woman’s lot in life has objectively improved over the past three decades, her mood hasn’t. Professors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers analyzed several different studies conducted from 1972 to 2006 and found that women’s happiness has actually declined over time, especially in relation to to men. This happiness gap emerged in the 1990's, and reversed a long-standing trend of women reporting greater levels of happiness than men.
Of course, our cultural, religious and political beliefs will inevitably influence how we interpret these findings. Conservatives will be eager to malign feminism for tricking women into putting their jobs before marriage and children; liberals will spout off about our country’s family-unfriendly policies and look longingly towards Europe. But hold the blame: it turns out that this decrease in satisfaction holds true for women regardless of age, marital, fertility or employment status (although women with some college have shown a sharper decline in happiness than others). It even crosses borders: despite “socialist” Europe’s enviable maternity and paternity leaves and childcare subsidies, their women have grown unhappier, too! Money does have something to do with it, but it isn't the root of all problems. The data showed that today's women are less satisfied with their family's financial situation than their mothers and grandmothers were (that would apply to me), but that this disturbs them more than it does men.
So what gives? What’s bumming us out? Unfortunately, Stevenson and Wolfers don’t really know, although they do plant some seeds for thought. One hypothesis is that women aren’t actually less happy, they’re just measuring their happiness by different—stricter—standards. As the study authors put it, “Women may now compare their lives to a broader group, including men, and find their lives are more likely to come up short in their assessment."
In other words, women were happier when they compared themselves to other women. But now that they are comparing themselves to men (who, let's face it, are still the more powerful sex), they feel like they're even worse off than they were before -- even if the inverse is true.
Another of Stevenson’s and Wofer’s theories relates to high expectations: “The increased opportunity to succeed in many dimensions may have led to an increased likelihood of believing that one's life is not measuring up.” So women who have grown up thinking that modern society treats men and women as equals are extra-disappointed when they inevitably realize that this isn't true.
This "paradox" may actually be more of a corollary than a contradiction. In her insightful 2000 book, "Flux," Peggy Orenstein called ours a "half-changed world" -- and almost a decade later, that's still true. Opportunities for women have greatly increased over the past fifty years, but society hasn't changed enough to allow us to take full advantage of them -- and that's a huge letdown. The study authors say, "Women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness."
Ah, the perils of complexity. Gender inequality isn't black and white anymore; we know that women aren't really from Mars and men aren't really from Venus, but we're still not sure if we came from the same planet. As I'm constantly complaining, it's easy to putter along, thinking men and women are equal, until we slam into parenthood. Then the inequalities become undeniable and unavoidable. Women are told that we can be anything we want to be, but we can't have anything we want to have, especially if what we want to have is a happy, fulfilling professional life as well as a happy, fulfilled family. "Women today are more likely than men to believe that their opportunities to succeed exceed those of their parents," Stevenson and Wolfers say -- so what happens when we fail? The world rewards ambitious girls who want it all, but I think it punishes ambitious women (especially mothers) by forcing them to make great sacrifices. The fact that we haven't yet resolved this certainly makes me want to cry.
But you know what? I'm going to try to buck trends and take an optimistic view of these findings. All things considered, this happiness gap is a pretty good problem for women--and especially, for feminism--to have. This could be a wake-up call for the decreasing number of young women identifying as feminists, a rallying cry for the girls who have been lulled into believing that we live in a post-feminist society where everything's coming up roses for the ladies. The reason that women of the past may have considered themselves happier is because they didn't know what they were missing. If we're generally less satisfied with our lives now because we expect more for ourselves from our society (and our lives have grown "more complex," as Stevenson and Wolfers put it), then that just proves that our work isn't done. We still need to push for equality and fairness in all areas of life (personal, political, professional), and to continue to create public policies that address the increasing complexity of modern life, and make life easier for women and men. Let's get serious about addressing our unhappiness.
