We’re like a broken record on Anne of Carversville, writing about women’s declining happiness. I don’t fully understand the nature of our unhappiness. In fact, it beats the heck out of me.

Marcus Buckingham wrote an excellent piece for Huff Po yesterday, What’ Happening to Women’s Happiness.

As we age, men become happier and women less so.As young adults women are happier than men. As genders age, the opposite occurs, leaving women signicantly less happy than men.

Note: there’s another strain of the argument that says whoever wrote that life is supposed to be happy? Perhaps our expectations have also evolved since the sixties, when “happiness” wasn’t such a perceived entitlement.

Back to Buckingham, who does a comprehensive job of reviewing the wide variety of research studies on women’s growing unhappiness.

First, a topline declaration: All told, more than 1.3 million men and women have been surveyed over the last 40 years, both here in the U.S. and in developed countries around the world. Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men. via Huff Po

For one little moment, let’s stay off the women’s stress conversation, because we don’t have it with men who do work the same aggregate hours.

I want to call out a couple facts about men and their contributions to housework and childrearing that few women want to admit. These statistics compare people in developed countries around the globe and hold universally give and take a statistically acceptable range of differences.

Hours Worked Per Day: At Work & Housework

For example, these trends are not caused by women working longer hours than men. We know this because women don’t work more hours than men. In a mammoth study of twenty-five countries, ranging from the U.S. to France to Slovenia to Madagascar, men and women were asked to keep track of what they were doing at various times during the day, and then the hours for each activity were calculated. The results: in developed countries, men average 5.2 hours of paid work a day, and 2.7 hours of homework, for a total of 7.9 hours a day; and women average 3.4 hours of paid work, and 4.5 hours of homework, for a total of, yes, 7.9 hours a day. These averages are statistically identical in virtually every developed country in the study: women and men work the same number of total hours in a day.

Time Spent with Children

In 1977 dads with non-teen kids spent 2 hours with them on an average weekday, while moms spent 3.8 hours. Today moms still spend 3.8 hours, while dads’ kid-time has climbed to 3 hours per week day—and if you are a Gen Y dad, you’re all the way up to 4.3 hours per day (Gen Y dads actually spend more time with their non-teen kids than do Gen X moms.)

One of my core consulting trends is “Are We Happy Yet?” and for good reason. I do not understand why American women and others in the world are so unhappy.

If we look at who IS happy, it’s people living in Costa Rica or Colombia. Many experts argue that the loss of relationships in pursuit of productivity and materials goals has resulted in increased family tension — especially between wives and husbands.

Researchers at the University of Bonn have shown that we suffer unhappiness knowing that we earn less than someone else, and the unhappiness outweighs our happiness over earning more than someone else.

This is but one of many factors driving answers to the question about whether or not we’re ‘happy’ and the measured used to calculate happiness in the first place.

For certain, we ladies especially are complex characters, when the subject is happiness. My personal wish, though, is that we could get onto the facts — which are that men have made hugely more progress than we give them credit for producing.

The Science of Happiness via Sydney Morning HeraldAn America, when we look at hours spent at work; household chores and childrearing, the genders are in a state of relative parity, with the aggregate totals being essentially the same. ‘Yes’, men spend more time at work, and ‘yes’ women spend more time on housework. But the gap is closing rapidly, and the younger the couple, the greater the parity.

Journalists should utilize the global stats on this important issue or “time spent”, not small internet surveys or anecdotal comments on such a critical topic.

I remain astonished at articles like Martha Brockenbrough’s article Mad at Dad, when the reality of today’s dad’s are much more aligned with moments like this one:

Steve Monforto Dishes Up Big Hugs

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There’s a growing number of experts who say that perhaps women just will never be happy. The more we have, the more we want.

If women are accused of not handling stress well, we get all hot and bothered. And of course, there are men who are jerks, never honoring their commitments, just as there are women who are slackers. Just about every woman agrees that men don’t need a house as spic and span as women. In fact, this reality annoys the hell out of us.

Yet, the sexes press on together, trying to reach some state of equilibrium with each other.

Bottom line, women become more unhappy as we age, leaving many men refusing to deal with our growing fury. In these marriages, perhaps divorce is the best solution.

Personally, I wish we could spend more time dealing with the facts and the verifiable truths around women’s lack of happiness.

In my own personal journey, I found that huge elements of the answer lay within myself, not with men and not with social institutions. The day I faced myself in the mirror was a banner day on the road to my own happiness and self-actualization. Anne

See Anne’s writing: Chore Play as Foreplay on Sexy Futures

The Science of Happiness Harvard Magazine