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Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, searching perhaps for alliteration, picked an unfortunate and/or loaded term in Saturday’s Op/Ed piece while lamenting a new study that’s been getting a lot of buzz:

But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women?

She said it here.

First of all, yeah, the feminist revolution has already ended up benefitting men. You’d have to ask women who remember the days before the feminist revolution to say whether women have benefitted. As for whether men or women have benefitted more… I dunno. If the premise is that men can’t know women’s subjective experience or vice versa then I guess you have to take a look at the results everyone else is talking about. Which, fortunately for all concerned, others more skeptical than your average concern troll or NYT columnist already has.

Echidne of the Snakes, a statistician, reads the actual study (via Language Log’s Mark Liberman) and reports

She also points out that the statistics gathered, um, don’t actually show women are unhappier.

In the first set of surveys spanning 1972-74

In the second set of surveys spanning 2004-2008

Oh rats!

85% of men reported being some kind of happy in 1972-1974
86% of women reported being some kind of happy in 1972-1974

86% of men reported being some kind of happy in 2004-2008
86% of women reported being some kind of happy in 2004-2008

Yes! A huge change! Huge differences! And yes, Dowd’s right, men are one point happier while women’s overall happiness hasn’t increased (ok, ok, or decreased) at all, while women’s unhappiness has increased a whole three tenths of one percent! Roll back that clock, baby, right back to the beginning of Nixon’s 2nd term! We’d all be better off, right?

Echidne nails that one

Most importantly for the purposes of bashing feminism, stay-at-home wives are no happier than those who work

Read the quote in context here.

I didn’t think so. Nor, one imagines, does even Maureen Dowd think so.

Heck, not even Pat Robertson university graduate and Virginia wingnut-party gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell believes we’d be better off!

Which is a good thing what with (for better or worse) reported happiness and/or unhappiness statistics being pretty much where they were when Nixon won his second term.

One last thing, though: I happen to thing both men and women covered by those statistics are vastly better off than we were in 1972. And whereas relative happiness may not have changed much between genders, and therefore isn’t measured in comparative statistics, I’m pretty confident absolute happiness is a lot higher. Our food is better, our health is better, our jobs are more rewarding, our families are better, our schools are better, our sex lives are better, our environmental quality is better, our recreational opportunities are through the roof, our life expectancies are better, our mental health and ways to deal with mental-health problems are way better, and…

Our expectations are higher.

Uh. Oh! That last one ought to be a good thing — in fact it is! But near as I can tell it’s the only thing that keeps us from recognizing that we’re a) better off and b) happier in absolute terms than we were. The expectations thing is a bit of an issue, and a lot of our politics revolves around which direction we want them to go. And one source of that conflict of expectations is about whether we’d be better off if we just went back, past the heady days of the Nixon administration and the Viet Nam War to the halcyon days of… Don and Elizabeth Draper. Woah, talk about happy? It never got happier than that!

Note: This is the first of two posts on this topic