Women Are More Unhappy Always And Everywhere

I didn't expect the data to be so overwhelming and robust. The introduction of the paper begins as follows (italics in the original; bold emphasis mine):

The female well-being paradox is that women are happier than men in happiness equations but also more unhappy than men in unhappiness equations. Unhappiness and happiness are often treated as the flip side of the same concept and, when one considers many of their correlates, this appears to be the case. For instance, correlates of happiness such as unemployment, income, age, being married, and having a degree are the mirror images of each other in a happiness and unhappiness equations and simply flip signs (Blanchflower, 2020, 2021). But this is not the case with regards to sex. There is also evidence that at least in relation to happiness in the United States, the gap closed over time in the years before the Great Recession as women became relatively less happy (Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004; Stevenson and Wolfers, 2009). It seems this trend has been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic which differentially impacted the wellbeing of women. However, women appear to be resilient to wellbeing shocks during the pandemic since their happiness recovers faster than men (Fancourt et al., 2020). 

In this paper we show that gender differences in wellbeing – at a point in time and across time – are sensitive to the measures of wellbeing one uses, the timing of the data collection, the conditioning covariates, and the location of the individuals providing the information. 

We find that one part of the female happiness paradox is very robust: when answering questions about negative affect, women are always and everywhere more unhappy than men. This is true across time, country, and across different metrics of negative affect. This is perhaps best illustrated by anxiety: women are consistently more anxious than men, both pre- and post-COVID, and across months of the year and across years. But it is also true with respect to other measures on negative affect such as being depressed, downhearted, tense, lonely, frustrated, stressed, sad, and having restless sleep and other measures. 

Another set of results are also consistent. It is men (not women) who tend to have higher wellbeing when it is measured in terms of momentary positive affect (enjoyment, feeling fresh and rested, active and vigorous, cheerful and in good spirits), and in terms of domain-specific satisfaction with aspects of their life such as marriage financial status along with wider political and economic issues as captured by satisfaction with national government, democracy, the economy, the education system, health services and the standard of living. 

Confusion arises, however, only when analysts focus on the two most popular ‘global’ metrics of wellbeing, namely life satisfaction and happiness. Here the evidence on gender differences is far less clear cut. It is true that women’s happiness has declined relative to men’s since the 1970s in the United States, but this trend is not apparent, for example, in the UK where, over the same period, women tend to be a little happier than men. Furthermore, whether women are happier or more satisfied with life than men, varies tremendously across countries and over time, and across states within the United States.

The paper and its abstract are as follows:

Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used – anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger – and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep. 

Women are also less satisfied with many aspects of their lives such as democracy, the economy, the state of education and health services. They are also less happy in the moment in terms of peace and calm, cheerfulness, feeling active, vigorous, fresh and rested. 

However, prior evidence on gender differences in global wellbeing metrics – happiness and life satisfaction – is less clear cut. Differences vary over time, location, and with model specification and the inclusion of controls especially marital status. 

We also show that there are significant variations by month in happiness data regarding whether males are happier than females but find little variation by month in unhappiness data. It matters which months are sampled when measuring positive affect but not with negative affect. 

These monthly data reveal that women’s happiness was more adversely affected by the COVID shock than men’s, but also that women’s happiness rebounded more quickly suggesting resilience. 

As a result, we now find strong evidence that males have higher levels of both happiness and life satisfaction in recent years even before the onset of pandemic. As in the past they continue to have lower levels of unhappiness. A detailed analysis of several data files, with various metrics, for the UK confirms that men now are happier than women.

David Blanchflower & Alex Bryson, "The Female Happiness Paradox" NBER Working Paper, March 2022 via this site, hat tip to Fully Myelinated.