The Real Reason American Women Are So Unhappy

Photograph by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

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There has been much talk of women’s collectively plunging mood since Maureen Dowd took on the unhappy matter in her column, which was based on Marcus Buckingham’s reporting in the Huffington Post. 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.