ARE MEN OR WOMEN HAPPIER?

Attempts to find out whether women are happier than men have been made. Men base their happiness more on what they have amassed materially. Women tend to value family more. Sharon Jayson of USA today, reporting on research results writes: "Researchers analyzed decades of national data on 47,000 men and women to create a statistical model that shows women's happiness decreases, while men's increases, exceeding women's by age 48."

In a short film clip, a couple of older women were interviewed. One pointed across the street at her husband and grown twin sons and said 'while they carried out only the luggage, I was left to do everything else and I am tired'.

"Last year, a team of researchers added a novel twist to something known as a time-use survey. Instead of simply asking people what they had done over the course of their day, as pollsters have been doing since the 1960s, instead of the usual factual responses requested, women were asked about the emotions felt. Were they happy? Interested? Tired? Stressed? " This was written by David Leonhard.

There seems to be a growing gap between men and women. Women like visiting their parents less than men. It is suggested that men will sit and watch ball games with Dad while the women prepare food, cater, clean up, and wait on the men. There are without doubt, exceptions to that finding. There seemed no distinction between men and women as widows and widowers which seemed to me to be holding rather different criteria than married older people.

I was having difficulty accepting many of the conclusions. Women, presumably spend less time dusting than they used to do so the researcher concluded that the houses were nowdustier. He did not factor in hepa filters, vacuuming dust up rather than just moving it around, or central air conditioning requiring fewer open windows and thus letting less dirty air into the house.

Another assumption was that women were happier a few decades ago because they compared themselves only to other women, whereas they, today, compare themselves to men. How they reached that presumption was as clear to me as how Freud got so much mileage out of penis envy until the feminists pointed out that it really is penis pity. This writer also claimed that women haven't come as far as they wished and he finished the article with: "This weekend, I think I may volunteer to do a little dusting." He is all too reminiscent of John Gray who wrote "Men Are from Mars; Women Are from Venus." I think he was from the planet Uranus.