Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Another excellent, provocative op-ed piece by Vicki Haddock appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle (P 19) this week. Feminism has liberated women, and now, women have more control then they ever have before, but recent studies (The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness and Are We Having More Fun Yet? Categorizing and Evaluating Changes in Time Allocation) reveal that a majority of American women report being less happy now than they did back in the early 1970s.
Men used to report lesser levels of happiness and life satisfaction than women. This is not so anymore. Women's self-described levels of happiness have fallen and now rest below that of men, in every age category, regardless of marital status, education and employment. If we were to consult 'objective measures' of well-being we would conclude that women are happier than they used to be because the material, social and political status of women's lives have improved in recent decades. According to 'subjective measures' this isn't so (yet another reason to pay careful attention to 'subjective measures' of well-being, lest we implement disastrous social reforms).
Furthermore, it turns out over the last four decades, women increasingly spend more time on paid work, caring for adults and watching TV, and less time cooking, ironing, dusting, entertaining and reading, than in the 1960s, but it turns out that men are spending less time on paid work and relaxing more - including watching more TV. Men, it seems, are more comfortable with choice because they are more comfortable with being slobs.
Swarthmore psychology Professor Barry Schwartz, the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less" argues that "more choices are better, but more and more choices are not. Too much choice produces not liberation but paralysis." Numerous studies suggest that consumers are less likely to buy products if they are given too many options.
The same principle, Haddock suggests, applies to women's life choices. According to Schwartz, even if you overcome paralysis and make a choice, you end up less satisfied than if you had fewer options, because all our decisions are imperfect. You end up thinking about the alternatives you didn't opt for. The imagined alternative induces you to regret the decisions you made. When you have no choice and things aren't perfect, you can blame the world, "but when you have all these choices and you still feel regretful and unsatisfied, you end up blaming yourself. Hence, guilt."
Haddock contends that "the alchemy of female content may be to make bold decisions and then refuse to be tormented by the seductive lure of the untaken path." Women--and men, for that matter--need not abandon perfectionism altogether, they just must learn to be content with imperfect pasts.
Women, Haddock points out, are more prone to take their emotional temperature. Darrin McMahon, a history professor at Florida State University and author of the book "Happiness: A History" argues that we live in a society where we feel pressure to be happy: "When we're not, we feel like failures," he says. "What we get is the unhappiness of not being happy" creating a vicious positive feedback cycle. I imagine this feedback cycle is probably even more fierce for women, because they are even more aware of how unhappy they are when they are unhappy.
It might just turn out that "there was enormous social pressure on women in the old days to pretend they were happy even if they weren't" as Freakonomics author and economist Steven Levitt suggests, but, don't forget: women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn, and a decade after college graduation, women earn 31 percent less than their male counterparts, and "even after adjusting for parenthood, choice of field, hours worked and the like, a quarter of the gap remained."
In my opinion, women report being less happy than men because: 1) women have more unpleasant responsibilities than men (studies indicate children make married couples less rather than more happy, I imagine women bear the brunt of the burden), and; 2) women are treated 'unjustly' (studies have shown unjust treatment--unequal rewards, for instance--have a negative effect on your subjective well-being), and; 3) women are expected to be happier than men even though they have more unpleasant responsibilities than men, (higher expectations, I imagine, create an unpleasant positive feedback even more intense than the cycle McMahon mentions), and; 4) 'consumer guilt' (a problem for men and women alike, which, again, is probably a bigger problem for women than men due to higher hedonic expectations), and; 5) women are more comfortable indicating they are unhappy (as Levitt Suggests) despite the fact admitting so is still taboo (it might also turn out that in this day and age women are encouraged to employ a 'masculinized' notion of well-being thus conclude they are less happy then men). As Haddock points out, the problem isn't simply freedom. It seems to me that the solution to the subjective well-being gender gap would be to continue to advance the basic feminist agenda: material, social and political equality.
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
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