Happiness and Women

From Judith Warner, When We're Equal, We'll Be Happy, about the (un)happiness studies done lately finding that women are less happy today than they have been in the past:

The wage gap persists, particularly for mothers, who now earn 73 cents for every
man’s dollar. Our workforce and education system is still sex-segregated,
operating along generations-old stereotypes that steer most women into low-paid,
low-status, low-security professions. Women pay more for health insurance than
men, have more extensive health needs than men, and suffer unique forms of
discrimination in their coverage. (Women may be denied coverage because they had
a Caesarean delivery or were victims of domestic violence — both “preexisting
conditions.”) Regardless of the number of hours they work, they continue to do
far more caretaking and housekeeping work at home than do their husbands. And
discrimination against mothers (but not fathers) in the workplace is all but
ubiquitous.

These are not happy-making developments. And they’re not
failures of feminism. They are instead indicators of all the ways in which
society has failed women, most importantly — and this comes up time and time
again, in every section of the report — by failing to address the needs of
working families.

I haven't been interested in writing about the happiness gap simply because the response to it was so mind-numbingly expected ("feminism makes women unhappy!") that it was just an eye-rolling subject that other bloggers more than deftly handled. But Warner's contribution is the non-snarky antidote to the misplaced concern these types of surveys brought to the surface. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.