STUDY: Who’s Unhappiest? She’s 42, Single, and Working. “Fluke? Poor research design? Captured women when they were having a collective bad day at the office? I’m not so sure. In fact, a comprehensive analysis of the trends in subjective well-being across several decades revealed similar findings regarding female happiness. In The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness published by the American Economic Journal, researchers Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that although women’s life circumstances by most objective measures have improved greatly over the past few decades, women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relatively to men.”

Weirdly, those were the very decades in which feminism exploded onto the scene.