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Topics - thebigmanfred

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I found this recent study from http://www.nber.org/papers/w14969.  From the abstract:

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.

And from the Introduction:

By many measures the progress of women over recent decades has been extraordinary: the gender wage gap has partly closed; educational attainment has risen and is now surpassing that of men; women have gained an unprecedented level of control over fertility; technological change in the form of new domestic appliances has freed women from domestic drudgery; and women's freedoms within both the family and market sphere have expanded. Blau's 1998 assessment of objective measures of female well-being since 1970 finds that women made enormous gains. Labor force outcomes have improved absolutely, as women's real wages have risen for all but the least educated women, and relatively, as women's wages relative to those of men have increased for women of all races and education levels. Concurrently, female labor force participation has risen to record levels both absolutely and relative to that of men (Blau & Kahn, 2007). In turn, better market outcomes for women have likely improved their bargaining position in the home by raising their opportunities outside of marriage.


Given these shifts of rights and bargaining power from men to women over the past 35 years, holding all else equal, we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness toward women and away from men. Yet we document in this paper that measures of women's subjective well-being have fallen both absolutely and relatively to that of men. While the expansion in women's opportunities has been extensively studied, the concurrent decline in subjective well-being has largely gone unnoted. One exception to this is Blanchflower and Oswald (2004), who study trends in happiness in the United States and Britain noting that, while women report being happier than men over the period that they examine, the trend in white women's happiness in the United States is negative over the period. We will show in this paper that women's happiness has fallen both absolutely and relative to men's in a pervasive way among groups, such that women no longer report being happier than men and, in many instances, now report happiness that is below that of men. Moreover, we show that this shift has occurred through much of the industrialized world.

Thoughts?
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Introductions / Hello to all
Apr 03, 2009, 04:46 AM
Hello to everyone.  I'm new to posting on the boards here but I've been reading the comments here for a little while.  I co run a blog on gender issues, with a particular focus on talking about gender in a more inclusive manner.

I've found the forums here and the links to be very useful.  SYG is a great resource!