The Decline of Female Happiness

Wolfers and coauthor/wife Betsey Stevenson show that women have become unhappier over the past 35 years, in their study, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

“Two facts stand in stark opposition: women’s lives over the past 35 years have improved by most objective measures and we document that, during this period, measures of women’s subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively to that of men. While the expansion in women’s opportunities has been extensively studied, the concurrent decline in subjective well-being has largely gone unnoted. These facts raise difficult questions about how best to assess and measure well-being since a standard economic framework would suggest that expanded opportunities for women would have increased their welfare.

By many measures the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary: the gender wage gap has closed; educational attainment has risen and is surpassing that of men in recent cohorts; women have gained an unprecedented level of control over fertility; technological change in the form of new domestic appliances has freed women from domestic drudgery; and women’s freedoms within both the family and market sphere have expanded. Blau’s 1998 assessment of objective measures of female well-being since 1970 finds that women made enormous gains. Labor force outcomes have improved, as women’s real wages have risen for all but the least educated women, and women’s wages relative to those of men have increased for women of all races and education levels. Similarly female labor force participation has risen to record levels both absolutely and relative to that of men, and women have become more tied to the labor market (Blau and Kahn 2007).

The rise in women’s relative wages has improved their position both in the marketplace and potentially within the home as higher wages may improve women’s bargaining position by raising their opportunities outside of marriage. While concern has been raised about the potential for labor force participation to increase the total amount of work done by women, time use surveys do not bear these fears out. Aguiar and Hurst (2007) document relatively equal declines in total work hours since 1965 for both men and women, with the increase in hours of market work by women offset by large declines in their non-market work and a small increase in non-market work by men. Blau (1998) points to the increased time spent by married men on housework and the decreased total hours worked (in the market and in the home) by married women relative to married men as evidence of women’s improved bargaining position in the home.

Yet trends in self-reported subjective well-being indicate that women are less happy today than they were in the 1970s. This finding of a decline in women’s well-being, both absolutely and relatively to that of men, raises questions about whether modern social constructs have made women worse off, or alternatively about the Interpretability of subjective well-being data analyzed over long-time periods. The second possibility is that broad social shifts such as those brought on by the changing role of women in society fundamentally alter what measures of subjective well-being are capturing.

Subjective well-being data have come to be used in the psychology and economics literatures because they have been shown to be correlated with physical evidence of affect such as smiling, laughing, heart rate measures, and electrical activity in the brain and have relatively high test–retest correlations (Diener 1984). Yet these measures do not necessarily indicate that subjective well-being measures are able to capture the positive or negative consequences of large-scale social changes over time.

It has been recognized that an individual’s assessment of their well-being may reflect the social desirability of responses and Kahneman (1999) argues that people in good circumstances may be hedonically better off than people in worse circumstances, yet they may require more to declare themselves happy. 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. Similarly, women may now compare their lives to a broader group, including men, and find their lives more likely to come up short in this assessment. Or women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness. Diener (2000) notes that one of the hallmarks of subjective well-being is that it is subjective, stating that “objective conditions such as health, comfort, virtue, or wealth” are “notably absent” and, while influencing subjective well-being, “they are not seen as inherent”. This aspect of subjective well-being makes understanding what is behind declining female happiness a challenging task, yet decoding the paradox identified in this paper may indeed be the key to a better understanding of subjective well-being.”