Abstract
Due to declining fertility rates and increasing longevity, the world is growing older. Improving the quality of life of older adults, and not merely preventing deaths, is thus becoming an important objective of public policies. It is, therefore, urgent to understand the key dimensions of older adults’ subjective well-being as well as their main drivers. Women represent a large proportion of the older population, and existing evidence suggests that they may be particularly vulnerable, especially in the developing world. Analyzing potential gender differences in experienced well-being in older adults is hence crucial. We exploit information on time use and activity-specific emotional experiences from the abbreviated version of the day reconstruction method contained in the WHO Study on Global Ageing and Adult Health (SAGE), focusing on five developing countries. We first quantify gender differences in experienced well-being among older adults, which we then deconstruct into corresponding differences in time use and activity-specific net affects. Adjusting for age only, our results indicate a gender gap in experienced well-being in favor of men. Yet, adjusting for additional individual characteristics and life circumstances beyond age weakens this association. Illustrative counterfactual analyses further suggest that gender differences in activity-specific net affects appear more important than differences in time use for explaining the disadvantage of older women. Our results suggest that women’s lower affect in most activities is linked to the conditions under which these activities are performed, and in particular to the higher level of disability of older women compared to men of the same age.
Highlights
Subjective well-being is increasingly recognized as an indispensable complement to traditional indicators of economic performance and human development, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Human Development Indices (HDI), to comprehensively assess and track the welfare of societies as a whole as well as the well-being of different population groups (Stiglitz et al 2009; Dolan et al 2008)
Building on previous research on gender differences in various dimensions of subjective well-being among older adults in low- and middle-income countries (Kieny et al 2020b), we provide a detailed analysis of gender differences in experienced well-being that isolates the relative roles of gender differences in time use vs. gender differences in activity-specific affective experiences to account for any differences in experienced well-being between men and women
Our study highlights an age-adjusted gender gap in experienced well-being in favor of men, and shows that these gender differences weaken considerably once further individual characteristics and life circumstances are incorporated into our models
Summary
Subjective well-being is increasingly recognized as an indispensable complement to traditional indicators of economic performance and human development, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or Human Development Indices (HDI), to comprehensively assess and track the welfare of societies as a whole as well as the well-being of different population groups (Stiglitz et al 2009; Dolan et al 2008). Several studies suggest that subjective well-being may influence more objectively measurable life circumstances, such as productivity and social behavior, as well as individuals’ health and longevity (e.g., De Neve et al 2013; Diener et al 2017), which further highlights the importance of subjective well-being as a key goal of health, social, and economic policies. Several neuroimaging studies have shown that subjective well-being reports are closely related to multiple cognitive-emotional brain regions (e.g., Luo et al 2014; Sato et al 2015; Ren et al 2019)
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