Freedom to choose what to do with one’s life has the strongest correlation with happiness

From Gender and Well-Being around the World: Some Insights from the Economics of Happiness by Carol Graham and Soumya Chattopadhyay.

Some interesting findings. They define happiness in terms of well-being. Happiness is a notoriously slippery term and the authors have some good discussion around the issue of definitions, particularly in a cross cultural-context. And in fact their discussion about the various trade-offs in terms of question-framing and survey design is quite good as well.

Women’s happiness seems to fall – at least in the short-term - when there are changes/improvements in gender rights, in keeping with our more general findings on the drops in reported well-being that are often associated with the process of acquiring agency.

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Our main finding is that women are happier than men world-wide. The standard deviation of happiness levels across women is also smaller than that of men. We find a consistent pattern across levels of development and over time.2 Well-being levels are generally higher in countries with higher levels of development, and the gap between male and female happiness is also greater in countries with higher levels of development. When happiness levels rise or fall (they did the latter, on average, from 2005-2010), the levels of women and men tend to co-move, with the gap between

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Another example of the effects of cyclical changes is a trend that Eduardo Lora and I (2009) have called the “paradox of unhappy growth” in which, controlling for average per capital levels of GDP, respondents are less happy in faster growing countries. We explain our results, at least in part, by the difference between the effects of changes and levels of income on wellbeing. While higher levels of income – and all of the things that typically accompany them, such as political rights and public goods – are associated with higher levels of well-being, many of the changes that accompany rapid income growth, such as increased inequality and insecurity and changing rewards to different skill sets, are often associated with lower levels of well-being, at least in the short term.3 One can imagine that the same sort of phenomenon could occur at times of change in gender rights and the role of women in the workforce.

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We then compared differences in male and female happiness within countries around the world more generally. In addition to the basic finding – women are happier than men world-wide – we looked at differences across age and education cohorts, and also compared developed to developing countries. We find that the gap between male and female happiness is greater (women are that much happier than men) in older (over age 40) than in younger cohorts. The gap is also greater in urban rather than rural areas, and among educated (completed high school and greater) rather than in less educated cohorts. Women seem to be happier as they age, if they have more education, and if they live in urban areas, which is what one would expect from a gender rights perspective (one can imagine that gender rights are more equal in these cohorts). This is an important departure from the findings from the World Values survey study, though, which finds a larger gap between male and female happiness in less developed countries).

We also found some related and interesting findings for marriage. While overall, married people are happier than non-married people, a finding which is consistent throughout the happiness literature, we find that young married people (in the age 15-40 cohort) are less happy than the average, while married people over 40 are happier than the average. Along the same lines, married people in urban areas are happier than the average, while there is no difference between married and unmarried people in rural areas. Our findings on marriage and education run in the same direction with the coefficient on marriage being much stronger for educated married people than for non-educated married people. All of these findings suggest that the effects (or correlation) of marriage on happiness are more likely to be positive in cohorts where gender rights are more equal.

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Women are happier than men in the United States. Yet women’s happiness declined in the 1970’s and 1980’s compared to men’s. After that point they trends co-moved. Some of that difference may be explained by initial changes and then stabilization of gender rights, with women’s taking on professional roles becoming increasingly the norm by the 1980’s and 1990’s, and, perhaps, by increasing sharing of household work across genders as dual wage-earning households became the norm. An interesting supporting finding is that we find that freedom to choose what to do with one’s life has the strongest correlation with happiness (across both genders) in the richest group of countries, precisely where there is more of it and people are more likely to expect to have it.

Read the whole thing. A lot of subtelty in the findings.