Written by Ally Kim
Princeton University, Department of Economics, Spring 2020
Status quo on gender roles, and thus the unequal treatment women receive based on sex, has diminished significantly in the past few decades. In the United States, women now represent nearly half the labor force (DeWolf, 2017). In some states, women earn more post-secondary educational degrees than their male counterparts. Female leaders have been on the rise, with a record breaking number of Fortune 500 female CEOs in 2019 (Zillman, 2019). Although the gender wage gap still persists, it has nonetheless significantly narrowed from where it stood decades ago (“What You Need,” 2019). Looking back at the strides made in women’s rights and comparing women’s lives today to those of the past, most can agree that women today enjoy a heightened sense of freedom and self-authority in all areas of life.
From this, common sense suggests women’s subjective well-being to have improved as well. In other words, women today should be happier than their counterparts decades ago. Despite improvements having been made to women’s rights, however, some evidence shows that women have become unhappier. Stevenson and Wolfers (2009) studied this phenomenon in depth and named this anomaly the paradox of declining female happiness. In fact, this is not the only paradox observed in academia about the relationship between subjective and objective well-being.
An example is the Kuznets curve developed by the economist Simon Kuznets. The Kuznets curve is an inverted U-shaped curve, through which he hypothesizes that as a country develops, inequality first increases and then decreases in the later stages of development (Kuznets, 1955).
Kuznets (1955) associates such phenomenon to factors such as unequal distribution of wealth and widening of the urban-rural income gap which occur in the early and mid-stages of development. Likewise, the economist Richard Easterlin (1974) introduced the Easterlin paradox, with which he explores the relationship between a nation’s income level and its people’s happiness. He claims that after a nation passes a certain threshold of wealth, its people’s level of happiness no longer positively correlates with the national income (Easterlin, 1974).
Although both of these ideas have long been subject to criticism by other economists, such paradoxes nonetheless raise important questions about the relationship between objective and subjective well-being and encourage the reevaluation of presumptions about what contributes to happiness.
Such paradoxes motivate my research question, “what is the effect of changes in gender equality level on women’s happiness?” The key point of my question is that I am observing how changes in gender equality level affect women’s happiness, not the gender equality level itself. The reason is that I do not think such decline in female happiness during periods of time in which gender equality has advanced, if such decline exist at all, is necessarily caused by the higher level of gender equality itself. Rather, I think it is caused primarily by women’s changing expectations following the change in the gender equality level.
During such transitional period, women’s rising expectation of their lives will clash against the society’s yet persisting beliefs in the “traditional” role of women to thereby increase women’s perceived discrimination they feel from others and dissatisfaction with their lives. This will offset the additional happiness women feel from increased opportunities. In the same vein of thought, during times of declining gender equality, women will become unhappier due to their persisting expectations of what they believe they are entitled to and such expectations not being met during times of retreating gender equality. There are evidences that support the idea of declining happiness during times of change, which I explore later in this paper. By conducting this research, I hope to inform policy makers and gender equality activists on the kinds of impact the implementation of gender-related policies can have on women’s happiness.