Happiness is subjective, relative and keeps on changing along with the growth of the individual and change of life style.It is by no means Absolute.Hence efforts to measure and quantify Happiness is absurd, not with standing Psychologists’ objections,as Happiness can not be defined.
Having said that what exactly women want?
They want lower insurance premiums?;do not want to maintain home?
In the case of the former, because of the fact Nature has made them differently, they have unique functions,like pregnancy and delivery as well as the complications that may arise out of it.Fortunately or unfortunately Men are not endowed by Nature thus in this regard.Insurance companies collect more premium because of cost ot flow and not because of gender discrimination.Conversely do you expect Men to pay higher premium on par with Women because only then Gender equality is ensured?At this rate ,you might even demand Men deliver babies!
On taking care of Home,it is purely personal and optional;if you do not want to do it,don’t;if your spouse objects to it, better leave him to assert equality.
Coming to wages, how many women are paid equally or more than Men in MNCs.?In factan Indian Lady was Pepsi CEO.
Women have gone to space, been Prime Ministers and in fact India is controlled right now by a lady.
Recognition and monetary rewards are related to performance and not gender,especially in Business and politics.
People keep on harping equality.What exactly is needed?Obviously men can not deliver babies nor can they feed them. Short of this men will do every thing they can and are doing and shall do so.
Please be clear about what you want;individual maladjustments can not be made a social issue.
All said and done life is about getting along with people and in the process one may have to compromise,no gender, for Life is nothing but full of compromises.
You never realise and enjoy happiness when you have it and you keep on chasing mirages.In life, expect less, especially of relationships, and give more-that is the secret of Happiness.
Story:
When We’re Equal, We’ll Be Happy
Barbara Ehrenreich is now the latest to weigh in on the Female Happiness Conundrum — the whole cultural brouhaha caused by the news from Wharton School professors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers earlier this year that despite all the objective improvements to their lives over the past four decades, women today appear to be less happy than they were in 1972.
It’s been a hot-button issue, this most recent iteration of Freud’s too-often-repeated question about what women want. The whole declining happiness thing has been spun into an indictment of feminism (the “triumphant: I told you so” as Ehrenreich puts it), sparking an angry response that those who claim women are unhappy post-feminism are nothing more than agents of an anti-woman backlash.
That accusation is often correct. But not necessarily in Stevenson and Wolfers’s case.
Wolfers defended himself in The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog last week, arguing that his and Stevenson’s study isn’t the only one to show declining female happiness since the 1970s. He and Stevenson further admit, in the course of their paper, that their numbers really don’t tell us anything clear about why women now report being more unhappy, only that they do. And whether that increased reporting of lesser happiness actually corresponds to a decline in lived happiness is another question that Stevenson and Wolfers are very open in admitting they can’t answer.
I appreciate this. I tend to have a problem with studies that measure nebulous emotional states and then compare them back to other nebulous states experienced at different moments in time. You learn a lot from them about how people answer surveys, but not so much about how they objectively felt. Happiness, after all, is hard to quantify; you can’t measure it in a blood test, or map it in a mathematical equation corresponding to patterns of neuronal activity in the brain. It also tends to be relative; we judge our happiness, at least in part, against our expectations of how we are supposed to feel and how good we think life is supposed to be.
These inner “supposed”s may well have changed for women since the early 1970s, as Stevenson and Wolfers more or less say, in fancier language. They suggest that the opening up, diversifying and expanding of women’s sphere of existence may have given them more things to potentially be unhappy about: “… the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy.” Entering the world of men may very well have raised the bar of expectations: “If happiness is assessed relative to outcomes for one’s reference group,” they write, “then greater equality may have led more women to compare their outcomes to those of the men around them. In turn, women might find their relative position lower than when their reference group included only women.”
In other words: if you expect less for yourself, you’re easier to please.
The early 1970s was a limiting time for women, but it was also, perhaps, a hopeful time. There was definitely a feeling in the air that women’s lives were changing in a positive way. There was a sense that everything was possible, that life for women was getting better, that if things hadn’t yet come together as well as they should have, they inevitably would. Down the line. Like, today.
Life for women has not come together. That, at least, is the very clear conclusion you have to draw after reading the essays contained in “A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” a book-length report released this week by the Center for American Progress. Despite its cheery-sounding title, the report conveys a bleak portrait of women’s non-progress in our day. The wage gap persists, particularly for mothers, who now earn 73 cents for every man’s dollar. Our workforce and education system is still sex-segregated, operating along generations-old stereotypes that steer most women into low-paid, low-status, low-security professions. Women pay more for health insurance than men, have more extensive health needs than men, and suffer unique forms of discrimination in their coverage. (Women may be denied coverage because they had a Caesarean delivery or were victims of domestic violence — both “preexisting conditions.”) Regardless of the number of hours they work, they continue to do far more caretaking and housekeeping work at home than do their husbands. And discrimination against mothers (but not fathers) in the workplace is all but ubiquitous.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/when-were-equal-well-be-happy/?apage=3#comments
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