Why
men are getting happier (and women more miserable)
Part II
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?
The
idea might seem less provocative if the women's
movement of the 1970s hadn't promised the moon
and the stars to begin with. On top of better jobs
with better salaries, it told of a utopian future — a
gender-neutral society where women and men would
suddenly be considered absolutely equal. "We
are talking about a society in which there will
be no roles other than those chosen or those earned," feminist
Gloria Steinem once pronounced with characteristic
grandeur. And in some ways, the Steinem crowd delivered.
In
its report, TD Economics said that participation
in the workforce of Canadian
women aged 25 to 44
jumped from 50 per cent 30 years ago to nearly 82
per cent in 2005. In fully 28 per cent of some 4.6
million couples surveyed, women had higher salaries
than their husbands, compared to 11 per cent in the
late 1960s — a figure broadly reflective of
similar trends across the Western world. On average,
U.S. women now earn 76.9 per cent as much as men
(63.6 per cent as much in Canada), marking steady
growth from the 59.4 per cent they earned in 1970.
Education
saw even more sweeping change. By 2004, 62 per
cent of all B.A.s in Canada
were granted to
women. Even more impressive is the revolution at
medical school. According to the Association of Faculties
of Medicine of Canada, the majority of students at
13 of Canada's 17 med schools are women. At Université Laval's
faculty of medicine in Quebec City, for example,
female enrolment has hit 70 per cent for the past
two years, after peaking at a record 80 per cent
in 2005, while on five other campuses last year more
than 60 per cent of first-year medical students were
women. And the laundry list of advancements goes
on. Reliable birth control; more freedom at work;
better vacuums and washing machines — all played
their part in making women's lives easier. Yet the
lift in women's spirits you might think would result
is nowhere to be seen, say Betsey Stevenson and Justin
Wolfers, co-authors of the Wharton study, "The
Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." "We
found that in the 35 years in which women made the
greatest progress, they got less happy," Wolfers
said in an interview from Philadelphia. "The
big question is why."
Article
continues below
One
popular theory, to borrow a phrase from the financial
world, is irrational exuberance. Through
media imagery and peer pressure, goes this thinking,
women have been encouraged in recent years to seek
it all — be smart, accomplished, a good mother,
a good lover and manage to look svelte and fashionable
all at the same time — never realizing that
the headlong pursuit of perfection would cause bone-numbing
fatigue. Stevenson and Wolfers accept this explanation,
but only to a point. "The natural thing for
people to assume is, of course, women are less happy
than men because they have to juggle a career and
kids and they're tired," says Stevenson. "But
this is not just a story about moms. It might be
about women pushing themselves to excel."
It
might also be a story about chemicals. Comprehensive
studies of psychiatric data show that nearly twice
as many women as men will develop depression-related
disorders at some point in their lives, and the numbers
are growing. In 1990, seven million American women
suffered from depression; this year the number is
up to 12 million, exactly twice as many as men. "Because
this depression gender gap coincides with puberty
and disappears after menopause," advises the
Mayo Clinic in a publicly disseminated circular, "some
researchers believe that hormonal factors increase." Even
after puberty, with its attendant identity issues
and screaming matches with mom, the risks for women
remain disproportionately high. Premenstrual trouble,
postpartum depression, menopause itself — all
create a landscape fraught with psychological sinkholes
for women as they go through life.
This
is all a way of saying that whatever's making women
sadder may merely be aggravating what's already
in their heads. And that's where the gender wars
come in. Some critics believe that by convincing
females they could succeed in the workplace without
sacrificing family life, the women's movement set
up the vast majority for disappointment; whether
you're talking hormones or spare time or fatigue,
they're just not equipped to handle what the feminists
envisioned. It's a theory so freighted with controversy
that Wolfers jokingly calls it the "Rush Limbaugh
interpretation," implying as it does that women
were better off when they were barefoot in the kitchen. "Did
the women's movement make things worse? Unattainable?
Plausibly, yes," muses Wolfers. "The puzzling
part of the data is not why women are unhappy today,
but why they were so happy in 1970."
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by
Charlie Gillis & Barbara Righton Source:
http://www.macleans.ca
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