I would be remiss if I did not talk about love on Valentine’s Day. Romantic statisticians (ahem!) ponder deeper questions about whether women and men share the same ideas of, and satisfaction with, happiness, love and their love life.
Where is the love?
According to a Gallup study, on any given day, around 70% of the world’s population report experiencing love. The “world leader in love” is my home country, the Philippines, at 93%– closely followed by Rwanda and Puerto Rico. I expect today to be a lively day for these countries! But this study is based on data from 2006–2007, and a lot has changed since then. Moreover, it didn’t distinguish who was feeling the love more: women or men?
I’m sure we can all agree that love is often a key ingredient in happiness, along with family, friendships, education, and work, among others. A 75-year study found that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. So, when we talk about love, we can’t ignore happiness.
What makes us happy?
In 2007, I co-led the formulation of the Philippine Happiness Index. We asked individuals to identify their own sources of happiness from a list and to assign weight to each source. For example, I define my happiness from satisfaction in my love life, family, work, friends, etc.; while my best friend defines hers as coming from work, education, religion, sports, etc. Despite these differences, we can still compare our scores because we recognize that different individuals have different sources of happiness.
In an expanded 2010 study, both women and men respondents considered family, health and religion and/or spiritual work to be important sources of happiness. They both tagged participation in cultural activities, community and volunteer work, leisure and sports, and technological know-how as lesser sources of happiness.
The outstanding disparity was on sex life! Men categorized it as 10th most important (out of 20) while women considered it their 18th most important (or second least important) source of happiness! However, in terms of actual happiness with their sex life, both women and men respondents ranked it in 11th place. The take-away: it’s one thing to say how important something is; it’s another thing to actually be happy with it!
Who’s happier – women or men?
Gallup surveys suggest that income and education correlate with higher life satisfaction. And since global data show that women generally have lower incomes and less education, one could assume that women are less happy than men.
Yet, a survey covering over 100 countries reveals that women are more satisfied with their lives than men. A 2003 Pew Global Attitudes Project covering 44 countries showed the same results, and a 2008 Nielsen Happiness Survey found that women are happier than men in 48 of 51 countries.
So what is making women happier than men? Some explanations include women’s focus on non-economic factors – while men concern themselves more with external factors, making their happiness less “recession-proof.” A University of Southern California study found that women generally say they are happier than men, but they have different reference points for what constitutes happiness.
Can happiness influence the progress of societies?
“If the government cannot create happiness for its people, then there is no purpose for government to exist.” - Legal code of Bhutan (1729)
As early as 1972, the King of Bhutan founded a visionary strategy of development – recognizing that “Gross National Happiness (GNH) is more important than Gross Domestic Product (GDP).” The eventual efforts to measure GNH was meant to contribute to the realization of Bhutanese desire for ultimate happiness.
UN Women has argued that although there have been several initiatives to measure happiness, a gender perspective has yet to be adequately integrated to ensure that issues such as violence against women, unpaid work and women’s agency are embedded in these measurements.
A 2017 OECD paper shows that globally, satisfaction levels drop by as much as 4% if gender-based discrimination in social institutions exists, while eliminating discrimination reduces “unhappy” people by 9%! Moreover, women and men are happier when living in a country guaranteeing equal rights and opportunities.
Time-use analysis raises further issues. Known as the “motherhood employment penalty”, having children under age 6 dampens women’s labour force participation by 5.9 percentage points, while increasing men’s by 3.4. Moreover, women do three times as much unpaid care and domestic work as men, often in the name of love. But this work can be oppressive and exploitative, hampering caregivers’ opportunities. As the feminist economist Diane Elson put it: the fact that much unpaid care work “is done for love, does not mean that we always love doing it.” I couldn’t agree more!
We can see that love and happiness can impact individual well-being, but also have the potential to impact societal progress. As such, public policies integrating gender equality ultimately hold the key to promoting happier lives for both women and men.
Jessamyn Encarnacion is the Statistics Specialist for UN Women’s global gender data programme, Women Count. Before joining UN Women, she worked for more than 15 years with the Philippines National Statistical Coordination Board, rising from an understudy in the gender statistics sector in 1997 to Director of the Social Statistics Office in 2013 and capped her national portfolio as interim Assistant National Statistician of the Philippine Statistics Authority during its formative period in 2014-15.
Gabrielle Leite contributed to this article.
Hidden Figures is a recurring column on gender statistics that seeks to inform, enlighten, guide, and reveal.
