The gender paradox in happiness: a study of the spanish case
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/ris.2026.84.1.1516Keywords:
Subjective well-being, Emotional or hedonic well-being, Satisfaction with life, Women and menAbstract
Empirical work has remarked that indicators of subjective well-being show a paradoxical trend concerning gender. Women simultaneously show higher subjective well-being and lower emotional or hedonic well-being. This fact has given rise to the so-called gender well-being paradox. This paper seeks to analyse this paradox in the case of Spanish society and advance the study of the conditioning factors (socioeconomics, phychosocial and cultural). After defining the forms of subjective well-being and reviewing the various explanatory proposals, we used a specific survey for the Spanish case, which allowed us to demonstrate the presence of the paradox and some of its determinants. Regression analysis supports the existence of different patterns between men and women associated with gender roles. The paradox is related to the socio-economic context of the well-being generation.
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