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What may be the most widely-discussed statistical over-interpretation in history is coming around for the third time. The first gust front of commentary blew in with David Leonhardt in the NYT Business Section in September of 2007, echoed a few days later by Steven Leavitt in the Freakonomics blog. In May of 2009, Ross Douthat's NYT column recycled the same research for another round of thumb-sucking. And the same material has just been promoted again by Arianna Huffington ("The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling", "What's Happening to Women's Happiness?", etc.), with an assist by Maureen Dowd ("Blue is the New Black", 9/19/2009).

Ms. Huffington tells us that

According to study after study, women are becoming more and more unhappy. This drop in happiness is found in women across the social and economic landscape. It doesn't matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.

And it's not because of the multitude of crises we are facing. Women's happiness has been on a downward trend since the early 1970s, when the General Social Survey, a landmark study, began examining the social attitudes of women and men — who, by the way, have gotten progressively happier over the years.

MoDo chimes in:

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.

People love this story. They love to speculate about the reasons for the trend — the favorites are variants of "too much feminism" and "not enough feminism" — and to tell us about their own happiness or lack thereof. Tens of thousands of readers, across the repeated reprises of this story in the mass media, have commented on various newspaper and weblog sites. In a certain sense, this tidal wave of response validates the story, which clearly resonates with something in the spirit of the times. But in fact, the empirical basis for all this fuss is so thin as to be practically non-existent.

I'll focus on the General Social Survey results, since I've looked into them in detail, but the rest of the worldwide background is similar.

One way to see what's happening is to look at this graph of General Social Survey results, from the preprint that kicked it all off in 2007:

Those who prefer tables may like to see it this way (taken from an earlier post on the subject):

If we sum up all the GSS responses across years, we get these proportions of answers to the question "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?"

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 31.2% 56.7% 12.1% Female 32.4% 55.1% 12.5%

In the responses for 1972, 1973, and 1974 (the earliest dates available), the overall proportions were:

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 31.9% 53.0% 15.1% Female 37.0% 49.4% 13.6%

In the responses for 2004, 2006, and 2008 (the most recent dates available), the proportions were:

Very happy Pretty happy Not too happy Male 29.8% 56.1% 14.0% Female 31.2% 54.9% 13.9%

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men … have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives." Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading. Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females. But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences. The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause.

Past LL happiness-gap posts:

"The 'Happiness Gap' and the rhetoric of statistics" (9/26/2007)

"Gender-role resentment and Rorschach-blot news reports" (9/27/2007)

"Why are economists so misleading?" (10/1/2007)

"The gender happiness gap: statistical, practical and rhetorical significance", 10/4/2007

"The happiness gap returns" (7/26/2008)

"The happiness gap is back" (5/26/2009)

"Women's happiness and pundits' accuracy" (5/27/2009)

Also maybe relevant, if you're not completely sick of the whole topic:

"Myth is truth (p < .05)" (12/23/2007)

If you want to do your own modeling, a csv file of the GSS happiness answers is here (some background on the data is here).

[I also note a certain lack of journalistic courtesy — Douthat didn't mention that Leonhardt and Leavitt had covered the same material a year and a half earlier, and Huffington doesn't mention Douthat, Leavitt or Leonhardt. I know that journalists don't need footnotes, but if a pundit reprises a story that's previously been featured by other pundits, doesn't journalistic etiquette suggest a tip of the hat to the earlier authors? Dowd does cite Huffington, which seems like the normal practice.]

[Update 9/30/2009 — a column on this topic by Katha Pollitt, "Are you happy?", The Nation, 9/30/2009.]

[Update 10/14/2009 — and another by Barbara Ehrenreich, "Are women unhappier? Don't make me laugh", LA Times, 10/14/2009; with a response by Justin Wolfers, "Nickled and dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich", Freakonomics (NYT), 10/14/2009.]

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