Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors does something I think should be done more often and… makes the (standard interpretation of the) recent gender happiness research Maureen Dowd, the Huffington Post, and others went on and on about this month. You know, the one that says it shows happiness for women has declined since roughly the beginning of the second wave of feminism back in the 1970s? Bartow performs a bold, daring, even radical demographic maneuver…
Assuming just for the sake of this post that this data and the conclusions drawn from it are true, why is the focus only on those horrible women who don’t seem to appreciate their improving situation? Why isn’t Buckingham also asking why the fact that fewer men are completing high school or college, and that only 41 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees and 39 percent of all the master’s degrees are being earned by men, seems to be making men happier? Is ignorance truly bliss? Once you make women the standard, and then compare men to them, it would certainly seem so.
Pretty cool! Not the findings so much — they’re controversial, and if they weren’t they actually show a one-point change for men that brings aggregate reported happiness to… exact parity (from 85/86% happiness for men and women to 86/86%.) But uncoupling one’s perspective from assumptions about who’s baseline-normal creates opportunities for really fruitful, really interesting lines if inquiry.
Too bad the study really doesn’t seem to be very reliable. Because as Bartow indicates there really are some interesting takeaways once you stop looking at it as an anti-feminist “gotcha.” The first being what on earth men would be complaining about if the advent of feminism has made them happier? Another would be why all the angst about school boys being “left behind” in education if it makes them so much happier in the long run?
Kudos to Bartow for bringing it up.
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p.s. Notice also that happiness graphs from the study that Bartow reprints in her post are suspiciously straight-line.
Submitted by 3217 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-09-27 12:13.
After reading the actual report I have an overwhelming urge to throw myself from my roof since I've apparently been living a life unaware of my own subjective misery, made more lamentable by the time I just invested reading Stephenson and Wolfsons uber downer of meta-analysis.
Anywhoo, I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment in an earlier post about a more likely culprit for the slight change in reported happiness among women -- increased expectations --which on it's face seems a more reasonable and less insulting explanation than "the complexity and pressure of women's changing opportunities" is just too freakin' much for "teh little ladies" to handle.
It's also irksome to veiw "happiness" as some type of zero-sum pie in which if one side is getting more then the other side must be getting less. Idjits.
I would also add another reason for mistrust of this "survey": since a "happiness" standard is subjective it must derived from some comparable as in "happy compared to what" or more likely "to who". Other studies suggest that people generally "feel better" about things if they think they are in a similar or slightly advantageous situation compared to their peers REGARDLESS of where they actually are on any qualitative scale. (For example, you'll be happier if you make $40k/year if your peer group makes $35k - $40k/year than you will if you make $75k/year and your peer group makes $75k - $125k.) In the '70s, when you looked around to compare youself with others you had your family and local social networks as well as the three national networks (with top shows like All in the Family, Welcome Back Kotter, The Jeffersons to name a few) with their limited newscasts and by today's standards, quaint advertising.
By the time we hit the 2000's we have multi-channel 24 hour news, Cable, Satilite, the internet, and a never ending supply of AV and and print media working overtime to convince you that you're ugly, stupid, poor and getting poorer, dumb and getting dumber, fat, lazy, impotent, and incontinent just to name a few. So now, in addition to what used to be a rather small and similar set of folks to compare your sense of well being to, you now have the whole, wide, airbrushed, pumped up, marketed-just-for-you world to convince you that you are on the losing end of something. Sheesh.
Please excuse the rant, Figleaf, but glass half empty "studies" of happiness irritate the flying f#*k out of me since Happiness is something of a hobby of mine.
If you have the time a better, and IMHO, more rational study of happiness can be found here http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/11280/ . It is the Measure of Gross National Happiness by Ruut Veerhoven at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. It's a study that was undertaken to assess whether or not "happiness" can or should be considered a national policy goal.
Enough ranting for now. As always, thanks for getting my blood going in more ways than one. :)
Stasha
Submitted by 3217 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-09-28 10:21.
Actually the whole "boy crisis" is a big myth.
The truth is that the gender gaps in schools are not large. Like a lot of things they can be made to sound dramatic if presented a certain way and written with an alarmist tone.
For example if 72% of all girls and 65% of all boys graduate highschool, then that means the dropouts are 35% of all males and 28% of all females. This is not a scenario where the AP courses are packed with girls with no boys in them, while all the students with problems are male. Far from it. Also universities are admitting males with lower qualifications to keep the gender balance? That reveals one thing in itself, that they are trying to keep a gender balance so that the schools don't become a single sex preserve.
If it was the other way around Rush Limbaugh would be having a field day. And pundits would be shouting from the rooftops that women are biologically unfit for education. Now if they attribute it to biology at all it is that the girls are biologically fit for schooling but the boys are budding Thomas Edisons and Bill Gates.
This article says it quite well, and my mother a 35 year teacher wholeheartedly agrees with every word:
"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040702025.html"
Furthermore if more boys are diagnosed as LD or ADD that is often because girls with learning disabilities often fall through the cracks.
"http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=11532"