It’s been interesting to hear my readers’ theories about why women have experienced a decline in happiness in the last 40 years. (Go look at the responses to my first post on this topic). As I said, everyone seems to have their own hypothesis why this might be so. But even though I talked about my own conjectures two days ago, I felt that something was a little off. So I went back to the General Social Survey (GSS) study that everybody’s citing. Lo and behold, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, the authors of the study, make NO claims to know why women’s happiness in the last 40 years seems to be on the decline. And in fact, they suggest that we might want to doubt whether the numbers actually reflect a downswing in women’s personal satisfaction at all.

Stevenson and Wolfers refer to a long-recognized understanding in the social sciences that individuals tend to reply in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others (the so-called “social desirability bias”). Some researchers argue that as a result of the social desirability bias, people in good circumstances may require more to declare themselves content, even though they may actually be happier than people in worse circumstances. Stevenson and Wolfers speculate that women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and, as a result, might reduce their previously inflated responses. Or that the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy. Either way, one indication that we should question the numbers, they say, is the decrease in women’s suicide rates over the last 40 years, while men’s suicide rates have stayed the same! That indicates that at least at the very bottom rung of happiness, women have become happier.

So that’s the first thing I learned: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” as Benjamin Disraeli supposedly said long ago. Beware numbers trying to bolster weak arguments, or maybe any arguments whatsoever.

But the other thing I learned is that the change in women’s satisfaction, if it has occured at all, is small. In the early 1970s, women’s purported happiness was somewhat higher than men’s. Specifically 5.1% more women said they were “very happy” than men, while the responses “pretty happy” and “not too happy” were very similar between the sexes. 40 years later, women’s supposed happiness is closer to men’s, but still 1.4% higher than their male counterparts (when answering “very happy” with the other answers again very similar to men’s). The reason this bothers me is the graphs used to show these differences. Marcus Buckingham (whose post started off these ruminations) reprints a graph that really misrepresents these disparities (not his fault — it was used in another analysis of the GSS by Anke Plagnol and Richard Easterlin):

original-1

Here’s what the data actually looked like:

Happiness1

Do those graphs look similar to you? They don’t to me. There has obviously been a slight downturn over the last 40 years in women who reported being “very happy.” But it’s not an ever-increasing downward slide (like soon we’ll all be down in the dumps!). The graph of the actual numbers jumps all over the place! And men’s responses sure look pretty flat to me. They’re not going up. So the data don’t support a statement that women have become increasingly unhappy over the last 40 years, as men have become happier. In fact, if we just believed the numbers, women today seem to be just slightly happier than men.

This graphic misrepresentation is just one of my bones to pick with Marcus Buckingham. He states that the trend toward women’s unhappiness is increasing; that men’s happiness is increasing (both of which we’ve seen are either untrue or exaggerations); and — worst of all — that women are to blame for their own unhappiness. Why? Because they tend to focus on their weaknesses more than men do! Here’s what he says:

What we do know for certain is that women are harder on themselves than men. When nationally representative polls of women and men are asked the question, “Which do you think will help you be most successful in life, building on your strengths or fixing your weaknesses?” men split right down the middle, whereas 73% of women report they would focus on fixing their weaknesses….Since women, as a group, believe that success flows from drilling down into their weaknesses, and since, as has happened to women over the last 40 years, they’ve gradually acquired more and more domains in which they are supposed to succeed, a researcher would expect to see women characterizing themselves more and more by who they aren’t, becoming more and more self-critical, and more aware of their flaws and failings, all of which might well accelerate these dissatisfaction trend-lines.

If there really were a gender gap for happiness, Buckingham blames the victim for its existence. He’s not the only one (also Maureen Dowd and Ross Douthat). Maybe Buckingham’s book will make up for this little tempest in a teapot. He’s interviewed the happiest and most successful women he could find to discover their secrets. If he doesn’t massage the data too much, those women may have great things to tell us.


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