The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

[Snafui]

From The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness:

 

"By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the
past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well‐being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well‐being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well‐being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well‐being for men."

 

When mothers stayed home families were better off prior to chasing equality, even financially:

 

"[T]he real wages of many men fell during much of this period. In particular, real wages for men with less than a college degree fell from 1979‐1995 (Autor, Katz and Kearney 2008). Many households experienced only moderate growth in household income, with those in the bottom half of the income distribution experiencing real growth of less than 0.5% a year from 1973 to 2005 (Goldin and Katz, 2007) and much of this increase was due to the additional earnings of wives."

 

Basically a group of unhappy women thought equality to men would make them happy. The people that listened to them neglected to notice that men were not as happy as women. Was any progress made towards equality? Yes! Women are closer to the same level of happiness as men, and those unhappy women that started it all. Good job feminists!

 

Misery loves company.

[Three]

Thanks for sharing this!

[utopian]

Off topic real quick, what is going on with curly mike and mo lol.

 

 

 

On topic, I have always been a supporter of the philosophy that you should be happy being who and what you are, what you were born naturally and have become naturally. If it is causing you problems, only then perhaps should you try and change something. I have always lived a much happier life this way, and it always confounded me how people can so often think they are going to some day be happy trying to be something they are not. 

 

Men do not have children. It is man's natural state of life to be physically active, to fight, to gather resources, to provide. To take what he wants. To agress, in pursuit of survival. Now granted that is much more curbed in modern times, but it still certainly has left me feeling more fulfilled to pursue some of these areas in at least general senses. 

 

Considering this, I can never quite understand how a woman could think she would be fulfilled not being a housewife mother with kids. At least have that as part of your life some time. If you want to be a businesswoman or something, fine, go for it, but have your children experience and wait until they are grown up and gone to do it. If I was a woman, I would certainly think I would regret not having kids, husband and family. This modern general unhappiness of women does not surprise me at all. 

[MrNlul77]

Arbitrary values and things are the problem, a person can't know true happiness without understanding their self.

 

Society skews the gender roles and puts pressure on the sexes to strive for false ideals.

 

I agree with either sex wanting to pursue certain avenues; however, at the expense of raising children is, IMO immoral.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Off topic real quick, what is going on with curly mike and mo lol.

 

 

That's my fault. Woopwoopwoopwoop!

[Frosty]

I've seen a few articles and videos about this over the years, from what I understand womens happiness relative to men's has been decreasing for the better part of 40 years, one of the more interesting videos I've seen on this is by Danielle Crittenden promoting a book she published about 16 years ago, she goes straight for feminism as one of the causes for decline.

 

Full interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h_ni-TeSvo

 

I also tend to align with Gavin McInnes on this, he's very traditional and is pretty bold abotu asserting that most women would be happier at home looking after children, you can see him clash with a woman about this here, quite funny:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OlmKXbMQfc

 

I think the truth is that feminism has pushed so hard for equality that they've denigrated traditional female roles of being a good mother and raising children as special and important in their own right, and taught several generations of young women that unless they're as strong an independent as men then they're not equal.

 

Feminisms biggest problem is that they ignore the bioloigical differences between men and women and pretend that we can both be happy and fullfilled doing the same things, and I'd argue that on average we cannot, that men get a satisfaction from working and building things that women simply don't get, women have found some satisfaction in care roles where they work with people and look after them, but they could be doing that at home with their own children and more frequently they're not.

 

Don't really have any sympathy for women though, it's up to them to figure out what they want and treat feminism critically, if they can't do that then too bad, it's their loss.