Why Are Women Unhappier Than They Were 40 Years Ago?

An excerpt from Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, by Marcus Buckingham

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Because the idea is, in the long run, that women's liberation will be men's liberation, too. — Gloria Steinem

Imagine it is 1969, and we're in a thriving American city. Let's choose Detroit. The '60s were good to the Motor City, and the future would have looked as bright as new chrome. Now imagine stopping a working woman on Detroit's Woodward Avenue, perhaps a young bank clerk, and asking if she would cast her mind forward, decades into the future. Not to picture the flying cars and space-themed restaurants that always seem to pop up in that era's visions of the future, but to think about the role of women at work, in business, in government, in life. What do you think she would have said?

That year—1969—was an intense, rousing time for women in America. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique a few years earlier and had founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. And Gloria Steinem, Friedan's more controversial compatriot, had just published the essay in New York magazine that clearly separated the modern women's movement from other oppressed groups, After Black Power: Women's Liberation, in which she called for meaningful work, equal pay, and the goal for all women to be freed from the role of only "servicing men and their children."

Fast-forward 40 years: No matter how optimistic the guesses of our woman on a Detroit street, I bet they wouldn't have outstripped what has actually happened.

I doubt she would have guessed that by the early 21st century women would be running the governments of countries as powerful and widespread as Germany and Ireland, Bangladesh and New Zealand, Chile, Mozambique, and Jamaica. Or that the wife of one U.S. president would spend months in 2008 as the national favorite to become President herself and, failing in that quest, would become an outspoken Secretary of State, or that the Speaker of the House would be a woman. Or that John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, would choose a moose-hunting, helicopter-riding, crowd-pleasing mother of five as his running mate because she'd stared down oil companies as governor of the tough state of Alaska.

How about education? I'm sure our woman on the street would have forecast that more girls would be completing high school and attending college, but do you think she'd have predicted that during the 2008 school year, 59% of all bachelor's degrees and 61% of all master's degrees would be earned by women, not men? Or that by 2009, four out of the eight Ivy League universities—Harvard, Brown, Penn and Princeton—would have female presidents?

And work? Again, she would probably have bet that, in the future, more women would be working, but would she have guessed that women would be holding more management and supervisory positions than men, by a margin of 37% to 31%? Would she suspect that, in like-for-like work, women would be earning exactly what men earn, and that women's pay would actually be increasing faster than men's? I doubt it.

Yet the biggest surprise would have come if you had asked her just one more question: Given all the evidence of women running corporations and universities, hospitals, media empires, branches of government and countries, do you think women in the future will be happier?

Of course they will be happy, she would have said. With all this choice and opportunity, how could they not be?

Well, as it turns out: too easily.

Each year since 1972, the U.S. General Social Survey has asked men and women: "How happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 3, with 3 being very happy, and 1 being not too happy?" This survey includes a representative sample of men and women of all ages, education levels, income levels, and marital statuses—1,500 per year for a total of almost 50,000 individuals thus far—so it gives us a most reliable picture of what's happened to men's and women's happiness over the last few decades.

As you can imagine, a survey this massive generates a multitude of findings, but for our purposes here are the two most important discoveries.

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