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Happiness Decomposition: Female Optimism

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Abstract

Using the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey and the European Social Survey we present evidence of differences in happiness by gender. Although worldwide women are happier than men, at the country level the happiness gap favors females in some cases and males in others. We decompose the happiness gap between observable characteristics and how male and females react to these characteristics. We find that the observables do not help to explain the gap, quite the contrary, they hide an unfavorable situation of women. That is to say, if females had the same objective individual characteristics than men, they would be even happier that what they currently are. We conclude that females tend to respond to individual happiness determinants in a much “favorable” way than men do. Our results are pervasive among geographic regions and country income groups. We also find a correlation between the observed and unobserved component of the happiness decomposition with gdp per capita, female life expectation and female literacy rate.

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Notes

  1. The literature presents several ways for determining this non-discriminatory coefficient β*. In this paper we compute it from a pooled model over both groups (males and females) including a gender dummy.

  2. For a complete discussion of this issue see Oaxaca and Ransom (1994).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad ORT Uruguay, Bulevar España 2633, 11300, Montevideo, Uruguay

    María Laura Arrosa & Néstor Gandelman

Authors
  1. María Laura Arrosa
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  2. Néstor Gandelman
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Correspondence to Néstor Gandelman.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 9 Are women happier than men?
Full size table
Table 10 Happiness determinants by geographic areas from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) and World Value Survey (WVS)
Full size table
Table 11 Happiness determinants by country’s income level from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) and World Value Survey (WVS)
Full size table

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Arrosa, M.L., Gandelman, N. Happiness Decomposition: Female Optimism. J Happiness Stud 17, 731–756 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9618-8

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