Women's Financial Insecurity Driving Dissatisfaction?

With our high level of cultural navel-gazing, studies about happiness have large audiences. Add a gendered comparison and the country is riveted. Maureen Dowd wrote in her September 19th column about a recent study showing women’s declining happiness (as compared to men) over the past 40 years. Her piece shot up to the #1 slot on the NYTimes top ten most e-mailed list and remained on the top ten list for five days, the longest I’ve noticed.

The research shows a consistent finding across nations, women are less happy then men and their happiness declines with age. Marcus Buckingham posed an interesting question in a blogpost on Huffington Post about this research: Why?

The reason that men are getting happier, it turns out, is their greater prosperity. I found the results quite surprising. Over the past few decades, our culture has celebrated the shaping of positive attitudes and women seem particularly invested in developing these resources (think of Oprah’s audience). Despite this greater awareness, women’s worrisome financial security is at the core of their declining happiness. Women spend more years in the financially inefficient state of being single, lose wealth and income if they divorce, and earn 80% of what men earn. With the risk of an episode of unemployment or a major health crisis, many women are not far from financial quicksand. And, what happens when all these women age into retirement?

We need a more integrated approach to increase women’s financial security and this may well become a major policy issue in the coming decades. And, it will most likely be addressed when more women are in public office.