On well-being, women do it better
With International Women’s Day over for another year, perhaps now we can have an informed discussion about some gender inequities that really ought to matter to Canadians.
It’s become commonplace for March 8 to precipitate widespread outrage over gender wage gaps. “Women’s work is never valued equal to men’s,” one angry feminist claimed in a column in the Hamilton Spectator recently. “Patriarchal attitudes are informed by the underlying belief that men are superior to women.”
Complaints also abound this time of year about insufficient female representation at the corporate level, on boards and in executive positions, as well as in politics.
International Women’s Day has thus become an event in which everyone seems to agree that men are actively conspiring to make life miserable for women. But while there’s no denying the facts on disparities in earnings and executive appointments, they don’t tell the whole story.
It has recently become popular within progressive circles to decry the role that gross domestic product and other economic metrics exert over our lives. Excessive focus on purely financial measures, we’re told, misses the underlying truth about standards of living. A better measure of life, we are told, should focus on what makes people truly happy, covering such things as health, social interaction, community involvement and personal growth.
The concept is becoming sufficiently popular that the Trudeau government is reportedly going to emphasize “personal happiness” in its upcoming budget by adopting the well- being approach to budgeting that was pioneered by New Zealand’s finance minister.
While no government can afford to ignore economic or fiscal matters, public well- being is an interesting concept that seems to be gathering steam. But if you accept that there’s more to life than mere dollars and cents, you should be prepared to go where the evidence takes you — even if it contradicts some dearly held beliefs.
Earlier this week, the OECD released a report titled, “How’s Life? 2020: Measuring Well- being,” which aims to put this notion into practice by compiling numerous broad indicators of living standards across member countries.
If you are sympathetic to a well- being approach to living standards, brace yourself. This latest evidence shows that Canadian women are doing substantially better than men.
Across the 18 categories considered by the OECD, men outperform women in only four — most of which are old- school GDP- style indicators covering such things as earnings and rates of employment.
In six categories, there’s no discernible difference between the sexes, including self- reported health, overall life satisfaction and student skills in science. The real story, however, lies in the eight categories where Canadian women perform noticeably better than men.
Of these, life expectancy is the most significant. Living standards don’t matter much if you’re dead, and the four- year gender gap in Canadian life expectancy — 84 for women, 79.9 for men — ought to be considered the most important gap of all. Rest assured that if women died earlier than men, the gender death gap would be a core component of every International Women’s Day, and a perpetual scandal.
Women are also more likely to report more time spent engaged in congenial social interactions and feel their views are better reflected by government. This seems noteworthy, given the popular International Women’s Day refrain about the lack of gender parity among elected officials. Perhaps gender representation does not correlate with gender influence.
On several other categories, women do so much better than men that the results run off the edge of the chart, including the likelihood of being murdered, committing suicide or dying as a result of alcohol or drug use. The recent levelling off in life expectancy in Canada
More to the point, what really matters in life?
is almost entirely attributable to the rise in opioid deaths among young men.
Finally, the greatest difference between men and women reported by the OECD concerns the deleterious effects of working long hours. Job strain is also significantly worse for men than women. We can assume this is largely because women prefer parttime work, which pays less but is often more personally satisfying, because it leaves room for other pursuits.
While the standard feminist interpretation considers this sort of unequal workplace data to be evidence of a patriarchal conspiracy, adopting a well- bei ng approach to l i ving standards puts working to excess and climbing the corporate ladder in an entirely different light. Here, it is a detriment to happiness.
This raises a rather complicated philosophical dil emma: should women continue to seek full equality with men in the workplace, knowing that such an achievement will be associated with a rather dramatic reduction in well- being? More to the point, what really matters in life?
What we can say for sure is that compared to women, men work too hard, are more likely to die young and violently, don’t get as much social time and often feel excluded from government. Someday we might want to set aside some time to reflect on these glaring inequities.