what’s up with women?
Posted on | September 23, 2009 | No Comments
I don’t get Maureen Dowd.
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
A good friend sent me this article, “Blue is the New Black,” and asked me what I thought about its implications for happiness for both women and men. It’s worth a (critical) read. Dowd cites the General Social Survey and Arianna Huffington, who in turn cites the GSS and an abstract from two professors at the Wharton School- the abstract (pdf) has some useful graphs and charts starting on page 34.
The starting point of both pieces is that women’s happiness has been declining since about 1970, when the GSS started measuring these things, while men’s happiness has been increasing over that time. The conclusions include things like Dowd asking rhetorically, “Did the feminist revolution benefit men more than women?” and Huffington proclaiming that “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
Apparently, all women are sad.
I don’t buy it, and here are two reasons: first, the articles don’t even mention the fact that most people (even those crazy people known as economists) agree that there’s no way to get people to be consistent about measuring happiness. I could have the exact same amount of happiness as someone else, but I might quantify it differently. Plus, women are constantly bombarded with ads and social messages telling us that we’re not happy, whereas ads for men are all: “you’re awesome! now be awesomer!,” which to me is a pretty good reason to suspect that women and men might describe their happiness differently in aggregate. Also, happiness and fulfillment are not the same thing, and it’s a huge leap from “less happy than before” and “more stressed than before” to “living an unfulfilled and empty life.”
Secondly, Dowd goes off on a tangent about how women take more medication for depression, and therefore must be sadder, while completely ignoring the fact that the social incentives for men and women to get treatment for mental health may be very different. So women may not be popping more pills because they’re sadder, but simply because it’s more acceptable for them to do so. If we’re gonna stereotype here, let’s just go ahead and say that it’s much more socially unacceptable for men to get help for mental health issues than for women, since mental illness still equates to weakness in many people’s minds.
I grant that Dowd might have a point with her idea that men are now less likely to have complete financial responsibility for the household and family, and that this might reduce stress for men. I celebrate this reduction in an unfair burden on men bringing home that good ol’ bacon. But I think the rest of her conclusions are significant extrapolations from the limited data.
As Anna North from Jezebel says, Enough With This Crap About Women’s Unhappiness.
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