You are here: Home / Archives / 2009 / October / 14 / Are Women Getting Sadder?

Are Women Getting Sadder?

By Jill on 10.14.2009

Barbara Ehrenreich hits it out of the park.

Thanks, Joel, for the link.

Posted in ,

Author: Jill has written 4631 posts for this blog.

Return to: Homepage | Blog Index

16 Responses

  1. 1
    Rita 10.14.2009 at 4:44 pm |

    hmmm…. or doesn’t quite hit the ball. The authors of the study responded to her article – it’s a worth a read for a balanced picture at least: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/nickeled-and-dimed-by-barbara-ehrenreich/

  2. 2
    Melissa 10.14.2009 at 5:22 pm |

    Thank you Rita for sharing that. I wasn’t quite satisfied with Ehrenreich’s critique either. I think the results are valid. Why women are getting less happy is a very interesting question for research to address. There has been some research indicating that part of this trend can be explained by uneven workloads between men and women, since many women are left to do the majority of household work after working the same amount of hours as men. It would be interesting to look at the difference between egalitarian and non-egalitarian relationships to see if it could explain part of this phenomenon. Just because we don’t like the results, doesn’t mean it’s not good science. It just means we need to ask more questions.

  3. 3
    Sheelzebub 10.14.2009 at 9:39 pm |

    Yeah, Rita, I read it, and it seems that they’re pissy that Ehrenreich disagreed with them. And notably, the commenters pulled out the mothballed rhetoric about how Ehrenreich was an angry feminist with an axe to grind.

    The data isn’t as cut-and-dried as pundits would have you think. More women are “very happy” than men, and while fewer women are “pretty happy” than men, their numbers have increased since the 1970′s. In addition, while women’s self-reported happiness (in the very happy category) declined several percentage points in the 1970′s (while still being ahead of men’s), it actually rose relative to the 1970′s reporting for “pretty happy.”

    Also, the researchers make quite a leap trying to link this with feminism. Why not the economy–lifetime employement is gone, company pensions are a thing of the past, housing has become more and more expensive to get, public services are underfunded, real wages (even adjusted for inflation) have fallen and the cost of living (even adjusted for inflation) has risen since the early seventies. I’m thinking that not only is there plenty of reason for people to be unhappy, but that is actually surprising that more people aren’t unhappy. But that’s the thing–you can’t take something subjective like an emotional state, survey people about it, and then decide that factor(s) X may have something to do with it. It’s just so much theory.

    I’ll also point out, if we must link this with feminism, that the 1980′s actually marked a turn for serious conservatism, and we haven’t really shaken it since. We have made some legal gains, seen some serious setbacks (example: reproductive rights), and have seen the general public sentiment be pretty damn retrograde when it comes to women. I mean, it’s not as if everyone is so open to feminist thought and women’s empowerment–if they were, feminism wouldn’t even be necessary. There has been, and still is, a lot of resistance to and a lot of vitriol flung at individual women (and women as a whole) who are seen as threatening to men. We’ve hardly entered a feminist utopia where everyone is happy and equal and fairly treated.

  4. 4
    Kristen J. 10.15.2009 at 2:18 am |

    Eh, overall good points, except that calling ordered probit modeling “occult” statistics was a bit uncalled for. I know we typically think, lies, damned lies and statistics….but statistics are useful.

  5. 5
    Yael 10.15.2009 at 2:31 am |

    The link doesn’t work for me.

  6. 6
    earwicga 10.15.2009 at 4:06 am |

    Rita, thanks for the link to the study’s reply. Very interesting.

    I was really taken with Barbara Ehrenreich’s article, and on the strength have order Bright-Sided. Hoping it is going to be the total antidote to self-help crap and all that horrible stuff like SUMO, which I particularly hate at the moment.

    Ehrenreich has a blog too :) http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/

  7. 7
    umami 10.15.2009 at 5:05 am |

    I loved the Ehrenreich article, and was a bit surprised by the vehemence of the authors’ reply. I’d read her article as more pointing out the acknowledged limitations of the study than attacking it. But maybe I mistook her tone. I don’t think the study itself was bad, just all the utterly moronic commentary on it, and that’s the perspective I took to her article. The “occult” probit model struck me as a perfectly forgivable joke.

    I’m very interested in her point that finding a (not actually) random dime somewhere caused people to self-report their happiness as being higher.

    My new favourite explanation for the slight statistical trend is that women have more random annoying things happen to them in a day than they used to. Because they get out of the house more. It’s totally possible that a happy fulfilled woman who’s just been harassed on the street might report her life-happiness as lower than a woman who feels no sense of fulfillment at all but hasn’t just had something irritating happen.

    I don’t think that explanation works with stay-at-home moms unless they too get out of the house more than they used to, but it’s just much more fun than the obvious “well, women expect more these days so obviously they’re not going to be so quick to rate their lives ten out of ten.”

    (The idiocy of the Freakonomics commentators is only to be expected. Men who think they know economics are some of the biggest misogynists on the web. And Freakonomics attracts men who believe themselves to be smart. Yikes.)

  8. 8
    umami 10.15.2009 at 5:24 am |

    And I just realised I did the same thing as the study’s authors in using “women” to mean “white women” in my comment above. Sorry about that. I did mean white women, not “women.”

  9. 9
    oldlady 10.15.2009 at 9:57 am |

    If women are more unhappy today, it might have something to do with the incredible pressure to be a sex object–which to my thinking has never been more intense. More face lifts, tummy tucks, anorexia, bulimia–and in addition to being that sex object, there’s the stress of the workplace plus doing most of the housework. Plus taking care of the kids, of course. Plus the economy, global warming, and war.

    And never forget how thrilled some researchers are to report that “women’s lib” has destroyed family values and put unbelievable pressure on women, thus making them sooooooo much unhappier than they were back in the good old days when they were in the kitchen where they belonged.

  10. 10
    rvman 10.15.2009 at 9:58 am |

    Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called “ordered probit estimates,”

    Actually, this is to be anti-intellectual about it. Ordered probit is about as ordinary and mainstream statistical technique as exists in all of Econometrics. It is the statistically appropriate methodology for many situations where you have response data in which you can say that a response “a” is higher than “b” is higher than “c” (etc.). (E.g. “very happy” is better than “somewhat happy” is better than “somewhat unhappy” is better than “very unhappy”.) It makes a couple of very basic assumptions about the random variation. There are other ways of modeling this data, but ordered probit is the most basic and standard one. (If you ever see someone running an ordinary least squares regression on ordered, discrete data, that is an error, generally reflecting laziness. This study doesn’t do that.)

    A better criticism of the paper is that the result may be statistically significant, but it is in no way clinically significant. “Statistical significance” just means that it is highly unlikely that the data would look the way it does due to chance, but it makes no claims that the result actually matters. 1% just isn’t a meaningful difference – it isn’t clinically significant in this context. Economists are bad about citing a statistically significant result without examining how big the effect is in absolute terms.

  11. 11
    PrettyAmiable 10.15.2009 at 11:28 pm |

    To an above commenter:

    The reason feminism is most frequently cited as a reason is because feminism would theoretically have a greater impact on women than men. If the real cause in the decline of happiness was something like the housing market, for instance, the same decline should theoretically be seen in both sexes unless for some reason we would understand it to be more impactful on one sex over the other.

    If there were more data points for the years between the two considered, we could run a regression to see which factors correlate most closely to happiness, but even then it’s just correlation versus causation. That’s something the experiment seems to have cited. “Rise in feminism happened during this time, seems to be the one factor that would have the most impact on this one gender, but MORE RESEARCH NEEDS TO BE DONE.”

    I would also argue that while it may not be clinically significant, just the fact that the data is statistically significant is interesting enough to investigate.

    If I were the author of the research, I would be pissed and defensive too. The research doesn’t draw irrelevant conclusions, and to have someone with some amount of clout announce to the world that your methods are flawed (because they disagree with the questions you say you want to see answered –wtf) and you’re publishing bad research – when this is what you build your life on – and it’s not true? I would be wicked pissed.

  12. 12
    ballgame 10.15.2009 at 11:53 pm |

    I agree that it seems very unlikely that feminism has caused women as a group to become less happy relative to men than they used to be. I also tend to agree with ryman about the key difference between something being “statistically significant” and something being “clinically significant.”

    There has been some research indicating that part of this trend can be explained by uneven workloads between men and women, since many women are left to do the majority of household work after working the same amount of hours as men.

    Melissa, I’m not sure where you’re getting your information. This study by Wharton professor Joel Waldfogel indicates that in fact, men and women in developed nations work just about the same when you count both paid work and housework. Men have a little more leisure because they apparently scrimp on sleep more than women.

  13. 13
    Sheelzebub 10.16.2009 at 4:41 am |

    The reason feminism is most frequently cited as a reason is because feminism would theoretically have a greater impact on women than men.

    Call me crazy, but I think making assumptions like that is deeply flawed. We could also theorize that the amount of sexism that is still out there–and the intense cultural guilt trips women are subjected to–contributes to this (as I pointed out, things have shifted to conservative since the 1980′s and the movement to actual progressive values has been slow, with much resistance to it), but the assumption is that it is despite (or because of?) feminism. There is also more openness and honesty–being honest about your feelings and your life simply wasn’t done to the extent that it is now.

    Or maybe it is because of feminism–that women are no longer as sanguine about being treated as less than human and less worthy than men.

    But really–it’s all theory, like the despite-feminism angle. The only thing you know from studies like this is what the statistics for a particular study says, not necessarily why. And as I pointed out before, the overall number of women who are happy has actually increased (despite the number of “very happy” women decreasing) more women are “pretty happy” than they were in the 1970′s–it’s not as if we’re all reaching for the Celexa.

  14. 14
    Sheelzebub 10.16.2009 at 4:49 am |

    Also, I’ll point out that the findings of the research cut across women in all occupations, including homemakers. So even women who were not living lives that were stereotypically feminist were part of this small statistical change–so again, why then point to feminism?

  15. 15
    Crys T 10.16.2009 at 10:05 am |

    And don’t the results show that those homemakes, mothers, etc. are in no way happier than the women who work &/or don’t have kids? In fact, don’t the results show that mothers, what we’re all supposed to aspire to, are UNhappier than non-mothers?

  16. 16
    PrettyAmiable 10.16.2009 at 2:41 pm |

    Well, it also depends on how you define “feminism.” The existence of this mode of thought in and of itself isn’t sufficient (i.e. the fact that there ARE marxists in the world doesn’t affect me in any real way, but some of the resultant behaviors/consequences/whatever do). So while not feminism, it could be something that resulted from the rise in feminism that would singularly affect women, such as greater full-time employment percentage, or the social acceptability of feeling angry when an individual treats you as second-class for being a woman or for the decline (in some ways, though we’ve got a ways to go) of it being acceptable to blame victims (who are disproportionately female) for sex crimes. These things all affect women more than men and could account for the comparative disproportion in the decline of happiness to some extent, or possibly in combination with something else.

    I also think that feminism having a greater impact on women than men is a pretty valid assumption. It’s not to say men are in no way affected by it, but the rise in women to have a real voice in the last thirty years is inherently going to affect the people getting the voice than the people who have had a voice and haven’t had to really lower it during the same timespan. The counter assumption is that men have an equal or greater influence from feminism, and I think that would be much harder to prove or defend.

Comments are closed.