Why men are getting happier (and women more miserable) Part I
While women work their brains out, men get more
and more 'neutral downtime.' Does this make them
the real beneficiaries of the women's movement?
It's
not like Paul is a total writeoff. He cleans up
the yard, makes sure the bills get paid, does
far more than his share of the laundry. But when
his common-law wife Catriona reflects on their relationship — and
how casually her 32-year-old spouse has thrown off
the cares of the workaday world — a note of
resentment creeps into her voice. "Sometimes
I get jealous of his freedom," admits the 25-year-old
public relations coordinator from Vancouver. "He
just doesn't get stressed, ever, really. I'm more
uptight. I worry about a lot of things."
Seven years ago, Paul quit a potentially lucrative
job as a business consultant to try his hand at writing
fiction, having decided there was more to life than
climbing the corporate ladder. (Names of couples
in this story have been changed.) The dynamic of
their relationship shifted accordingly: Catriona
is now the household breadwinner; Paul is living
an urban male's dream. When he isn't working on his
novel, he spends his days listening to music, riding
his mountain bike or indulging his growing interest
in urban development. Sometimes he reads books on
the topic, and occasionally he strolls about the
sites of local construction projects, getting a first-hand
look at cutting-edge developments as they rise from
the West Coast soil.
Catriona,
meanwhile, scarcely has time for household chores
or to attend the meetings of the charitable
foundation she joined a few months back. With a high-tempo
career and commitments to do volunteer work two or
three times a week, she certainly can't while away
a night at the bar watching Vancouver Canucks games,
as Paul has been doing with increasing frequency.
And while she doesn't consider herself miserable
("Paul supports me a lot in my work"),
his general nonchalance clearly contributes to her
anxiety. When he recently blew off an important appointment
after a night of drinking with his brother, she fell
into a black mood for days. "I'm not usually
snarky," she says ruefully. "I realized
later I was jealous or hostile or bitter that he
didn't have to work and I did."
As
the sands of gender roles shift in households and
workplaces across the Western world, the future
may hold more Catrionas and — to the fascination
of social economists — a lot more Pauls. Far
from suffering a crisis of confidence amid all those
high-powered females, men are actually getting happier
as the women around them find their place in the
workforce, recent U.S. studies suggest. Blessed with
salaried spouses and an economy that increasingly
values their brains over their brawn, males now enjoy
more of what one Princeton University scholar calls "neutral
downtime" — a fancy term for hours spent
watching football, playing computer games or drinking
with their pals. For guys, things have never been
better.
Their
wives, moms and girlfriends cannot say the same.
Adult females actually report lower levels
of happiness now than before they streamed into the
workplace in the 1970s and '80s, according to a study
by two economists at the University of Pennsylvania's
Wharton School, which has been making waves in academia
since it was published in September. Previous studies
of rising stress among females tended to focus on
the simple burden of time allocation: instead of
choosing one or the other, fully 73 per cent of Canadian
women raise children and go to work. And numerous
studies suggest women still bear the brunt of child-rearing
and household duties even if they work — hence
all the anxiety.
But
the so-called "happiness gap," where
more men than women tell pollsters they're pleased
with their lives, has highlighted some unexpected
trends in the interplay of the sexes. More and more
males seem willing to take a back seat to the ambition
of their wives, statistics show, content in the knowledge
women can now make enough to support the whole family.
According to a TD Economics report released last
September, as a wife's annual income rises to $100,000,
her husband is more likely to share domestic chores,
or stay at home altogether.
Sometimes the shift can take constructive form:
stay-at-home dads now make up some 11 per cent of
married couples. But not all the guys are using their
newfound freedom to become nurturers. Other studies
suggest they use a good portion of it watching television
or playing computer games. All of which raises questions
that hardline feminists will undoubtedly find perverse,
if not outright heretical. Are career pressures sucking
the joy from day-to-day life for many women? Were
they wrong to think professional success would ultimately
yield happiness? And if the rise of financially successful,
multi-tasking women over the past few decades is
doing little more than allowing men to load up on
couch time, who are the real beneficiaries of the
women's movement?
by
Charlie Gillis & Barbara Righton Source:
http://www.macleans.ca
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