ARE WOMEN GETTING SADDER? OR ARE WE ALL JUST GETTING A LOT MORE GULLIBLE?: Barbara Ehrenreich

in Guernica:

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so. ...

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.

more

Wolferts and Stevenson reply to a similar LA Times piece by Ehrenreich on their NYT blog:

...Our research is simply about documenting a fact: since the 1970’s, women’s self-reported happiness has fallen, relative to that of men. This seems paradoxical, given the tremendous strides made by the women’s movement. We report this fact, test that it is a robust finding, and suggest that future research may help sort out whether it reflects how the women’s movement affected women’s hedonic state; whether it reflects the differential impact on women of some broader social trend; or if instead it is telling us something about the (un)reliability of happiness data. ...

Oh, and she forgot to mention something else: The same trend that is evident in these data is also evident in the Virginia Slims Poll, the Monitoring the Future Survey, and in Europe, in the Eurobarometer. Last week, Chris Herbst reminded us of another dataset, the DDB Needham Life Style Survey. And guess what? Those data also show a significant trend decline in women’s life satisfaction.

Now, there’s still a real debate to be had about whether this trend is important. Ehrenreich says,

Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness — well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

This is a judgment call, but one best made with some knowledge about the determinants of happiness. It turns out that average happiness in a population is a rather stubborn thing and that this is a very large shift, relative to other things that affect average happiness.

For instance, the relative decline in women’s happiness that we document is about equal to what you would see if the unemployment rate rose from 4-1/2 percent to 13 percent, or if women’s incomes had fallen by over 30 percent. (See more, here.)

Ehrenreich is a fine rhetorician though, and she doesn’t miss a beat. She suggests that our study “purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972.” Purports? No, Barbara, we demonstrate that in half a dozen separate datasets, women’s reported well-being has fallen relative to men.

Here’s a challenge: find a single dataset that points in the opposite direction, and we’ll donate $1,000 to your favorite charity. And we’ve made it easy for you — start by downloading all of our raw data here.

more

Labels: culture, feminism, gender differences, men, mental health, women

posted by Eve at 3:36 PM VOTE

<< Home