The Childless Cat Lady Problem
In 1970, there were no female partners at Goldman Sachs, no female supreme court justices and only two female US senators.
Today, four of the nine supreme court justices are women, more than a quarter of the Senate and almost half the recent partnership class at Goldman.
Things have arguably never been better for young women.
They live longer than their forbears and their male contemporaries. They are more likely to likely to graduate from college and afterwards get a job that requires a college education. In major metropolitan areas, they earn more than men (see here).
But beneath all of the glass shards from shattered ceilings, lies a rarely discussed truth – none of this progress has made women happier. In fact, it has done the opposite.
Women’s subjective sense of well-being has fallen substantially on absolute terms and relative to men since the 1970s.
Betsey Stevenson’s and Justin Wolfer pointed this out in a seminal paper they published in 2008 called The Paradox of Women’s Happiness (see here). The paper demonstrated that happiness for women has declined across all data sets and demographic groups and in every part of the industrialized world and in absolute terms and relative to men consistently year over year since 1970.
Steven and Wolfer published their paper before the advent of social media enabled smart phones, which has taken whatever happiness remained for women and laid waste to it starting in 2012. Depression for young women is spiking to incomprehensibly high levels.
Now while in aggregate women today are less happy than men, this unhappiness is not uniform and depends on three factors - marriage status, religious attendance, and political beliefs.
Being married correlates to more happiness than being single, so does weekly religious attendance and being conservative. All three are also linked – if you are conservative, you are more likely to be religious and more likely to be married and the opposite is true if you are liberal.
Young liberal women are basically walking mental health disorders – 56% of young liberal women have been told they have a mental health condition (this as opposed to 27% of conservative women).
The irony is that even though being a liberal childless cat lady condemns you to a lifetime of panic attacks, women for some reason are choosing that path more than ever with women moving sharply to the left relative to men over the last decade.
Unpacking all of this is relatively simple.
The rise of female unhappiness correlates perfectly with the rise of birth control which correlates with the rise of childless women.
Given that evolutionary psychology tells us that so much of female behavior flows from the need to reproduce, it would follow that if that imperative is thwarted (in this case by science advances leading to cultural changes) – you would naturally end up seeing higher rates of unhappiness, which is exactly what we see in the data. Women who are childless are 46% more likely to be depressed than women who are married and with children (see here). With more childless women out there, the overall depression rate is much higher despite whatever advances they have made in other domains.
As you see childlessness increase, you will also see that maternal instinct get re-directed – in this case towards things like pet ownership and liberal politics. The problem is that taking care of a dog or attending a BLM rally is not the same thing as having a child so we are left with exploding rates of depression, particularly among women over the age of 45 – there were 2mm women on anti-depressants over the age of 45 in the year 2005 and now there are over 10mm.
I don’t have a prescription for solving this. I write to merely point out that this is a topic that we should discuss and discuss it with all the sensitivity that it deserves. But if we want to increase women’s collective happiness, we have to address this problem.