New York Times
Why Women Find Their Parents Unpleasant
By CATHERINE RAMPELLI recently received a copy of “ Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements” in the mail. The book, published by Gallup Press, is a readable digest of survey data and academic research on what makes people happy and what makes them unhappy. To the uninitiated in this subject, you may find that the things you think make people happy are, in the words of the book’s authors, “misguided or just plain wrong.”
For example, here is a version of one chart in the book that caught my eye:
Source: “National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life,” by Alan B. Krueger,
Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur A. Stone. Table 5-3.
The numbers are taken from this paper; Alan B. Krueger (a former Economix contributor and current Treasury official) was one of the authors. The study examined how Americans spent their days and how they felt when they were engaging in different activities. One well-being measure this survey helped capture is called the “U-index.” The U-index refers to the percent of time that people say they are, on balance, in an unpleasant state — for example, occasions when they say they feel more stressed, sad or in pain than they feel happy.
The bar chart shows the percent of time people are in an unpleasant state when they are around different types of companions.
It’s probably no surprise that people find spending time with their bosses — authority figures who keep them in line — to be most unpleasant. Almost a third of the time that women spend around their bosses feels unpleasant; for men, nearly half of the time spent around supervisors is unpleasant. It’s also probably no surprise that hanging out with friends — the people we choose to spend time with — is least unpleasant.
For most of the categories, men and women report being in an unpleasant state about the same portion of the time. But the biggest divergences relate to spending time with family, and not in the way that stereotypes of feminine domestic bliss might predict: Women appear much less happy when spending time with their children and parents than men do.
This can be partly explained by the different types of activities the two genders are likely to be doing around their families.
For example, when women are spending time with their children, they are more likely to be doing chores and handling child care, which can both be relatively stressful activities. When men spend time with their children, on the other hand, they spend relatively more time watching television and traveling — more leisurely activities.
The biggest gap relates to how men and women feel when spending time with their parents. When men are around their parents, they are in an unpleasant state about 7 percent of the time. Women find being around their parents to be unpleasant 27 percent of the time.
Again, some of this can be explained by what men versus women are likely to be doing when they’re with their parents. As Nancy Folbre has written here before, women are more likely to be tasked with caring for their elderly or disabled parents than their male counterparts are.
But even if you control for these different types of activities — that is, even when both genders are engaging in the exact same labors or pastimes with their kin — there are still “sizable differences in the U-index between men and women when they are in the company of their parents or children,” the study’s authors write.
So why do women feel less happy around their families, and especially their parents? Any explanations, readers?
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http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/why-women-find-their-parents-unpleasant/?src=busln
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/why-women-find-their-parents-unpleasant/?src=busln">http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/why-women-find-their-parents-unpleasant/?src=busln
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