Women's happiness has declined sharply over the past 20 years and now matches men's. The drop stems from fewer marriages and children, widening political divides between men and women, and social media fueling comparison and loneliness among young women.
Chapters
What's going on with women these days? We used to be a lot happier than men, and now we're not. What happened?
What you've found is that over the past 20 years or so, women have converged downward to the unhappiness levels of men. At first I thought, great. Men are getting happier, women are getting unhappier. That's what we find. And they're getting unhappier very quickly. And so there's a lot of different theories of it. You find that there's a lot less family formation going on. There's a lot less marriage. You find that men and women are diverging politically really, really quickly. You find that women are getting much more politically progressive and men are more conservative. And so the result of it is that, especially in a culture where people think that the most important thing for making a romantic match is voting for the same party, idiotically, social media is especially targeted at young women. It's creating a whole lot of misery with social comparison, with political hatred, with the sense of loneliness that's crawling out of people's smartphones, and all these things together are creating an epidemic of unhappiness among women, especially young women in our society today.
