"THE HAPPINESS GAP": Have You Fallen For The Latest Mainstream Media BS?

Photo Credit: "Red Heels" by ashortyslife on Photobucket

The commentators on women’s issues want you to know that you cannot have it all—or even a good part of all—without Paying A Heavy Price, the Woman Tax.  (Aren’t they the same people who insist the pain remain in childbirth?)

A big scare report invoking the Woman Tax made headlines in the 80s:  A woman over 40 is more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married.  Message:  You delayed marriage for career—well, ha!, no marriage for you.

Incredibly, women accepted this as gospel for years before some reporter did the simple math, comparing statistics, death by terrorism vs. marriages of women over 40, and concluded:  I don’t think so.

Now in the “post-Feminist era”, the new sad story is that women are not as happy as men.  A cadre of journalists—of the type who jump on every hand-wringing train—report that we were happier than men in 1970 but are growing less happy with every passing year.  The Happiness Gap is the Woman Tax on the social and workplace progress we have made since the 1970s.

I first read about the Happiness Gap two years ago in The New York Times.  Would they lie?

David Leonhardt in “He’s Happier, She’s Less So”:

“Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, the researchers also asked how people felt during each activity. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed?...There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women."

 

The Times ran another happiness gap story by Ross Douthat earlier this year.Then, in “The culture of (female) narcissism” on salon.com, Judy Berman asked if we are unhappy because we are narcissists.

   

“As studies about women's happiness (or, it turns out, lack thereof) keep rolling in, journalists continue to ask themselves the same question: Why, as we inch ever closer to equality of the sexes, are ladies more dissatisfied than ever? This week's attempt at an answer comes from The Guardian's Madeleine Bunting, who pegs a cultural epidemic of narcissism as the cause…"

Next, Arianna Huffington in “The Sad Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling” on The Huffington Post:

“Let's talk about unhappiness. Specifically, how it's growing in one segment of our society. And no, it's not white congressmen from South Carolina, hip-hop artists who feel Beyoncé got slighted, or recipients of ill-timed foot-fault calls.

   

"It's women."

   

 It's a question we'll be exploring in depth on HuffPost in the coming weeks, in a series of blog posts by bestselling author and lecturer Marcus Buckingham.”

  

Creator of The Strengths Finder tool, Buckingham is a motivational speaker who claims to have helped over 2 million people through his books, seminars and workshops.  There is the answer to our plague of sadness:  Enrich a man’s bank account.

Finally, this past Sunday in “Liberated and Unhappy” in the Times Maureen Dowd told us,

"American women are wealthier, healthier and better educated than they were 30 years ago. …But all the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness." 

Arianna and Maureen pushed me right over The Happiness Gap edge.

I searched for the two primary original studies on which most of  these dismal conclusions are based—and discovered Language Log  on the University of Penn’s website.  Researcher Mark Liberman  downloaded the big one, the General Social Survey dataset (which, he notes, was a copyright violation) and analyzed the data in the post “Women’s happiness and pundits’ accuracy.”  He and other academicians commenting on the site label the journalists’ conclusions distortions of the numbers and exaggerations of Betsey Stevenson’s and Justin Wolfers’ work.

Liberman says:

“There are a few more women, proportionally, who report their happiness as being in the extreme categories, and a few more men who assign themselves to the middle category. But either way, the differences are tiny — we certainly shouldn't describe this by saying that "men are happier than women". 

"The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like: 

"In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy". 

"30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy"." 

 

I see that Huffington and Dowd pushed him over the edge of the gap too because he posted again Sunday: 

THE HAPPINESS GAP IS BACK IS BACK IS BACK IS BACK:

“What may be the most widely-discussed statistical over-interpretation in history is coming around for the third time."

And he has a sense of humor:

“I remain hopeful that the web's fact-checking capability will gradually lower the level of bullshit in the mass media — but the effect is slow at best.  On the whole, I'm less worried about women's failure to become happier than about columnists' failure to become smarter.”  

 

Journalists draw sweeping, largely invalid conclusions from data they very likely don’t examine—and then frame those conclusions as documentation of a (women's) social issue they have defined and propagated.

Why do women report even slightly more unhappiness than men?  Here are my thoughts:

 

• Media coverage of women has a relentless focus on:

1. What’s wrong with us (physically, emotionally) that plays into

 2. How a self-help book, guru, motivational speaker, or new diet/exercise program will make us better. 

• Girlfriends! Women continually monitor and attempt to manage their girlfriends’ lives, especially sex lives.  Have you forgotten how much of the dialogue in “Sex and the City” was focused on three of the women debating what the fourth should do about her relationship?  In the name of friendship, women criticize and critique—while men just hang out together.  (Yes, that’s a generalization.)
•  Doctors/meds.  Whether they experience more depression than men or not—women report it more often.  Doctors seem to put women on antidepressants (which can be depressing) for the slimmest of reasons.
•  Sex.  Women are still learning how to conduct a sex life on our own terms.  Many women continue to have difficult reaching orgasm, especially during lovemaking.  The rules have changed, but not the score:  He comes; she doesn’t.

The Orgasm Gap is real.

Possibly, women, under the influence of those damn smiley face stickers, exaggerated their happiness level back in the 1970s.  And possibly men, who have a tendency to stretch their numbers, are pushing it a bit now.  The space between us is minimal. The so-called “Happiness Gap” is a tiny crack.

I read that the President might consider a newspaper bail-out.  It should come with conditions, like no reporting on surveys unless the writer and editor have read the survey and crunched the numbers.  If turning cracks into gaps sold newspapers, y’all wouldn’t need that bail-out, would you?

 

COMING  SOON:  THE SEXYPRIME SEX HAPPINESS SURVEY!

 

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