The Real Reason American Women Are So Unhappy

There has been much talk of women’s collectively plunging mood since Maureen Dowd took on the unhappy matter in her column [2], which was based on Marcus Buckingham’s reporting in the Huffington Post [3]. While they hit on a profoundly important phenomenon, both sadly gloss over the real reasons for it. Dowd winds up writing off the malaise as a natural consequence of having too many choices, while Buckingham tosses out some of the real culprits—rigid gender roles, long working hours, and the “second shift” of housework—like so many wadded-up tissues, as if they are too obvious to be true.

Buckingham dismisses the usual work-life issues by pointing out that things have begun to change. And he’s right, they have. Women are in the workforce in greater numbers, and men do more of the housework. But things haven’t changed nearly enough. It turns out, the problem isn’t that we have too many options—it’s that they all suck. Without real accommodations for working women, the choices are all still pretty disappointing. It may feel as if we should be done with “work-life issues”—the term itself sounds so '90s, evoking upbeat, pre-BlackBerry workshops. But we still haven’t fully confronted, let alone resolved, the unpleasantness of trying to do too much at once. As a country, we’ve done little in terms of easing women’s dual roles, and it turns out it’s affecting our mood.

The international picture helps explain why American women in particular have wound up on a downward emotional trajectory. While women in rich countries around the world may be becoming generally sadder (Buckingham cites a British study as well as two international studies that point in this direction), American women are still probably the gloomiest. Only 3 percent of people in Japan experience major depression in their lifetime, for instance, compared with about 17 percent of Americans, according to the most recent cross-national comparison of depression rates, conducted by psychiatrist Myrna Weissman in 1996. (Lebanon logged the highest level of any nation studied, at 19 percent.) While cross-cultural differences make true happiness tricky to measure, several studies using the same clinical definitions came to similar conclusions: Across the board in every country where depression has been studied, about twice as many women become depressed as men, and the disease typically sets in when women are in their early to mid-20s, around the time they’re probably grappling with the incompatibility of their competing responsibilities.

In the international studies, happiness tracks closely with national policies that address the work-life balance. Though happiness, too, is hard to quantify, one Dutch professor, Ruut Veenhoven, has tried, using data from surveys that asked participants around the world to rank their happiness level on a scale of one to 10. Veenhoven, professor of social conditions for human happiness at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and director of the online World Database of Happiness, ranked those in the family-friendly (or at least family-friendlier) nations of Sweden (in eighth place), Denmark (second), Finland (seventh), and Holland (13th) as happier than we are. For what it’s worth, the United States, birthplace of both “happy hour” and “the Happy Meal,” ranked only 31st in overall happiness.

So why are American women so particularly blue? For women, two of the most potentially life- (and mood-) altering factors are family size and work hours. American women have notable distinctions on both fronts. First, we have more babies than women in most any other developed country. While an American woman still typically has around 2.1 children over her lifetime, in other rich countries, family size has dropped significantly as women have gained access to jobs and education. More than 90 nations throughout Europe and Asia now have fertility rates well below ours. Second, even while we’ve continued to raise sizable families, American women have achieved the very highest rate of full-time employment in the world, with 75 percent of employed women working full-time.

This combination would seem to be untenable without support from government and employers, but American women get very little of that. The United States is a glaring exception in the developed world and beyond in having no mandatory paid maternity leave, no nationwide childcare system, few flexible work options, and, as we’ve heard lately, no universal health coverage. So while mothers in the Czech Republic can choose between having their paid leave stretch either from one to three years after giving birth, and every French parent can count on low- or no-cost preschool, women in the United States are bearing the brunt of working motherhood with far fewer supports.

Indeed, specific policies have a direct, documented impact on women’s mood, with the lack of paid maternity being perhaps the most obvious. Research has shown that time off from work to recover after birth can spare women some serious mental health problems. One study of Mexican women in the United States found that those who took at least 40 days to recover—the standard cushion in Mexico—reported less depression in the postpartum period. Whether paid or unpaid, longer maternity leaves are associated with declines in depressive symptoms, a reduction in the likelihood of severe depression, and an improvement in overall maternal health, according to a 2008 working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Not surprisingly, the nature and intensity of the work situation women return to also matters. Other countries have found ways to ease mothers back into work—the European Union, for example, has instituted protections for anyone who wants to work part-time, as many parents do. In the Netherlands, which has gone to even greater lengths to create flexible work options, some 75 percent of working women work part-time, as do many Dutch men. Here, we have instead a sort of “postpartum plunge” model, in which women often return to their jobs not only sooner than they’d like, but at full intensity. This, too, apparently takes a toll on the psyche. Mothers of 9-month-olds who work more than 40 hours a week were more likely to be depressed than those who worked that amount or less, according to a 2006 Child Trends study.

Again, it sounds obvious—a mother juggling a newborn and intense work stress will suffer. Yet a bizarre, punishing disregard for the impact of work stress on mothers of very young children permeates our culture. How else can one explain the U.S. Army’s policy of sending female soldiers back to work full-time just six weeks after giving birth and back into war zones just two-and-a-half months after that? Welfare policy reflects a similar disconnect from the reality of motherhood, with some welfare recipients now guaranteed no leave at all from their work assignments after having babies, which can mean being separated from newborns just days after giving birth. Together, these factors may help explain why, at least in the United States, parenthood now tends to be a downer, with both male and female parents more depressed than their childless peers.

In many ways, the pressures mount as women age and continue to feel the unalleviated pulls of working and parenting. Even though they may start out in the same schools and land in the same jobs, as their careers typically don’t offer the flexibility necessary to care for children, women often have to watch the income gap between themselves and their male counterparts grow—a gap that, given the lack of re-entry points onto career tracks, seems to widen even after children are grown. So, while many women, particularly those who can’t afford to “opt-out,” wind up overwhelmed and exhausted by the combination of full-time careers and motherhood, others wind up nudged out of their professions. Some leave the workforce altogether, but many just wind up in lower-paying, lower-status work that accommodates their schedules. Often neither option is what they wanted, which helps explain the gradual dwindling of women’s happiness. (On average, women’s happiness is higher than men’s in the early years of life and eventually becomes lower. The happiness graph lines cross at the age of 47.)

Since the strain of doing it all hasn’t stopped American women from working and having children, it has instead colored their experience of doing both, as Joan Williams, a pioneering work-life expert [4], argues in her blog. This has turned the age-old wisdom about “little bundle of joys” on its head. (Rather than having their lives brightened, parents apparently report more feelings of sadness, loneliness, restlessness, fear, and anger than nonparents.) Meanwhile, full-time work, too, has apparently lost some of its allure for women, with 60 percent of working mothers of minor children preferring to work part-time and only 20 percent preferring full-time, according to a 2007 Pew survey.

It’s as if, as they age, women are facing the vast gap between the dream of having “it all” and the exhausting and dispiriting reality of life as a working mother in the United States—and finding it, well, depressing.