Gender, religion and happiness

Abstract

Using an infrequently used sample of 60 countries this paper attempts to gauge the importance of religion and gender on the levels of happiness across countries, after controlling for a set of quality of life variables. The results suggest that both religion which is represented by the degree of religious fractionalization, and gender as represented by the percentage of women in parliament, have important effects on the degree of happiness. Specifically the paper finds that higher levels of religious fractionalization reduce happiness, but greater representation of women in parliament robustly increase happiness levels.