Women's Happiness Studies Are Bringing Me Down

2 years ago

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Lizzie, I agree that all the studies out there theorizing why ladies are darn near impossible to make happy are a little, well, sad. They're so ubiquitous you would almost think there were some Ladies Home Journal of Unhappiness -- most likely with a pink cover, featuring a gaggle of scientists brunching while they compare research notes and their latest shoe purchases -- exclusively dedicated to the topic of female glumness.

Whether women really are suffering from a happiness deficit is debatable -- Gallup just released a poll of 600,000 men and women on Monday that had levels of reported happiness trending about equally across gender lines. But the really gloomy part comes when the question is not whether women are happy but why women might be unhappy -- and everything from romance to biology to children to no children to feminism to office politics to religion to having just too many options to pick from gets a moment in the sun. Just check out Maureen Dowd asserting, among other things, that women are down because they are "hormonally more complicated," though she also ends up putting most of the burden on too many choices, paired with too many obligations.

Happiness is hard to measure, but even more difficult to measure is why someone might be happy -- or what might make an unhappy person happy. Someone might imagine that a sought-after promotion is the thing standing between him or her and happiness, only to find upon getting it that the increased stress and longer hours make him or her miserable. And a number of studies have suggested that it's the daily details (how much television you watch, for instance) as much as the larger elements (genes or social relationships) that predict reported happiness. In fact, one study published last year in Cyberpsychology and Behavior even suggested that blogging was likely to increase happiness.

You know, I'm feeling better already.

Filed Under: Woman Up, Culture

Tagged: happiness, happiness project, happiness research, happiness studies, HappinessProject, HappinessResearch, HappinessStudies, science, what women want, WhatWomenWant

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