Abstract
Using data from the World Health Organization’s Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE), we evaluate the relationship between gender and several measures of subjective well-being among older adults in developing countries. Furthermore, we contrast the partial associations of gender with these well-being measures when controlling only for age (age-adjusted analyses) with the corresponding partial associations when including individual characteristics and life circumstances as controls (multivariable-adjusted analyses). While age-adjusted analyses reveal that older women have lower levels of evaluative well-being than older men, multivariable-adjusted analyses show that - given similar life circumstances - they have equal or slightly higher evaluative well-being. This suggests that the gender gap in evaluative well-being may be explained by less favorable life circumstances of older women. Age-adjusted results also show that older women tend to have lower levels of emotional well-being. However, we find no reversal, but merely an attenuation of these gender differences in emotional well-being when controlling for additional individual characteristics and life circumstances. Finally, we perform Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to disaggregate the gender gaps in well-being into explained parts - attributable to gender differences in individual characteristics and life circumstances - and unexplained parts - related to gender differences in the association between life circumstances and subjective well-being. These results further corroborate our findings that women tend to be disadvantaged in terms of both evaluative and emotional well-being, and that this disadvantage is mostly driven by observable factors related to the explained part of the decomposition, such as gender differences in socio-economic status and health.
Highlights
In spite of encouraging trends towards the reduction of gender inequalities in many aspects of life during the last decades (Stotsky et al 2016), women continue to face circumstances that often inequitably affect their well-being
- when life circumstances and individual characteristics are controlled for - we find that the gender gap in subjective well-being diminishes drastically, suggesting that differences cannot be attributed solely to an intrinsic gender effect
We observe that the age-adjusted partial associations of being a woman with all four measures is negative in all countries, and statistically significantly so in most cases
Summary
In spite of encouraging trends towards the reduction of gender inequalities in many aspects of life during the last decades (Stotsky et al 2016), women continue to face circumstances that often inequitably affect their well-being. Older mothers may benefit from greater emotional loyalty from their adult children than older fathers (Knodel and Ofstedal 2003) Against this background, our study aims at investigating and interpreting gender differences in subjective well-being among older adults from several low- and middle-income countries. Beyond capturing complementary aspects of subjective well-being, evaluative and emotional well-being differ with respect to their antecedents and consequences (Kahneman and Riis 2005), and often show different associations with individual life circumstances such as employment status (Knabe et al 2010) or income (Kahneman and Deaton 2010). Contrasting the estimates from these models allows us to further investigate the potential role of individual characteristics and life circumstances on the two dimensions of subjective well-being and corresponding gender differences, even if we cannot identify any causal effects in our cross-sectional study design. - when life circumstances and individual characteristics are controlled for - we find that the gender gap in subjective well-being diminishes drastically, suggesting that differences cannot be attributed solely to an intrinsic gender effect
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