Happy is a Yuppie Word

I saw this item on NMK this past week: "rogue" economist Steven Levitt blogs about a study that reports that women's happiness has declined in the past 35 years, both absolutely and relative to men's happiness, despite all the changes brought about by the women's movement that have increased women's quality of life.

Why doesn't this so-called paradox surprise me? I suppose it fits in with studies that say women tend to be more depressed than men. Not to mention all those episodes of "Sex and the City" I've watched. And taking a look back at my journals...no, no surprise there.


But my curiosity was piqued, so I browsed through at Stevenson and Wolfer's paper in PDF format. My eyes glossed over at the stats (not enough of a nerd, unfortunately), but I thought the discussion section was interesting, and I liked their possible explanations a bit more than Levitt's. Here's a paraphrase of their list for possible explanations for women's decreased levels of happiness:


1. General societal trends that have come along with modernization in the past 35 years, i.e. less social support and increased anxiety, have impacted women more than men.

2. Society's definition of happiness has changed in the past 35 years. Greater opportunities have increased what women require to say that they are happy. Also, it may be more socially acceptable now for women to admit that they aren't happy than it was decades ago.

3. Changes brought about by the women's movement may actually have decreased women's happiness. Aware of their greater opportunities for success, women may feel that their lives are coming up short. Also, "...women may simply find the complexity and increased pressure in their modern lives to have come at the cost of happiness" (21).


All three of these reasons make sense to me intuitively--women lead complicated lives these days. However, I'm still a little skeptical, both about the methodology as well as the implications that you can draw from a study like this. Not being a sociologist, I can't really discuss the nuts and bolts of the method the researchers used, but, as Levitt points out, happiness is a slippery thing to measure. Can you really make broad generalizations of our society based on a poll where people are asked to rate their lives overall as "very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy"? What does "happy" mean anyway? Ask 10 people, you'll get 10 different definitions. Ask the same person on 10 different occasions, and you may get a different response every time.


Secondly, is it even that important to be "happy"? In the study, Stevenson and Wolfers found that in recent polls, 80 percent of women think that the overall status of women has gotten better. So why doesn't "better" mean happier? Why haven't greater opportunities made women happier? Maybe ignorance was bliss in some ways. Women expected less, and so were content with less, but does that really mean they were better off? I'd much rather be liberated than happy. I'd rather have what I have now, even if it means gi-normous amounts of anxiety, than go back to a time where women had fewer options in life. I guess what I'm saying is, happiness is overrated. Happiness is an emotion, not a state to aspire to. I'd rather be able to say that women are paid equally to men for the same work, that women's concerns about childcare are taken into account in the workforce, and that women are equally represented in positions of power in government and corporations than to be able to say that women are just as happy as men are. Compared to those things, happiness seems pretty unimportant to me.

Despite my issues with it, I still thought this was an interesting study. Anyone want to chime in on this one? What's your theory?