Why Are Women Unhappier Than They Were 40 Years Ago?

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So not only are women becoming less happy decade by decade, their minutes are becoming more stress-filled as well.

• Each hour of free time reduces men's odds of feeling rushed by 8%, but each hour of free time has no similar effect for women. So whatever is happening to women in their so-called free time is not helping them feel less stressed.

• For women the odds of feeling sometimes or always rushed are 2.2 times higher for married women with children than for single, childless women. The same is not true for men. Translation: kids inhibit relaxation for women, but not for men.

Looking beyond pure survey data, the World Health Organization can track what this increase in stress does to a woman's mental health. According to their most recent analysis, depression is the second most debilitating disease for women (heart disease is first), while for men depression clocks in at No. 10. As a result, women choose to medicate themselves with anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication twice as often as men do. Never one to miss an opportunity, the big pharmaceutical companies nurse this need by targeting two-thirds of all advertising of these medications explicitly to women.

'"Hey," you might say. "Life's tough. Deal with it." And of course you'd be right. Life is not designed with anyone's happiness in mind, and it has the disconcerting habit of not rewarding good people as much as we'd expect, punishing the wicked less vigorously than we'd like, and even on occasion getting the two completely mixed up.

Even so, only the most wasted of cynics would deny that something's got to give. Not only is this "tough life" significantly tougher on women than it is on men, but the advances of the last 40 years were supposed to have changed things for the better. And not just for womankind, but for each individual woman. Those hard-won rights, opportunities, and advantages were supposed to have netted women more than just another burdensome role to play—"you at work." They were supposed to have fostered in each woman feelings of fulfillment and happiness and even, for the special few, the sustained thrill of living of an authentic life.

This hasn't happened. Whether you're looking at the data or reading these stories or just listening to the sound of your own voice, the conclusion is hard to escape: Over the last 40 years or so, life is not becoming more fulfilling for women; it is, in every way we can measure, becoming more draining instead. To use Thomas Jefferson's words, while women now have the liberty to choose whichever life they'd like, many are struggling in their pursuit of a happy life.

Used by permission. Adapted from Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham (Thomas Nelson Publishers, copyright 2009).

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