Gender inequality, well-being, and ill-being: A macro analysis of human and societal flourishing

Does gender equality exacerbate the women-versus-men conflict or enhance their well-being? Scholars argue women's well-being has deteriorated despite their socioeconomic empowerment due to exacerbated burdens and persistently gendered treatment in the workplace and home. Cross-sectional research, in contrast, shows people experience higher well-being in gender-egalitarian societies. Apart from these contradictory views, little is known about how mitigating different dimensions of gender inequality longitudinally affects well-being over time. In this article, we conduct fixed effects regressions with bootstrapping to examine the link between gender (in)equality and well-being/ill-being using an originally constructed macro-level panel dataset for 137 countries over 15 years, composed of the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), Gallup's well-being metrics, and other indices from the United Nations/European Union. Our analysis shows that more gender equality positively predicts both average life satisfaction and the proportion of thriving people, while it is negatively linked to the risk of facing ill-being for both genders. This favorable trend is confirmed significantly in the economic domain, such that women and men are likely to flourish as women's presence in the labor market advances (e.g., a unit increase of economic GGGI predicts 1.25-point/1.05-point higher life satisfaction in the 11-point Cantril ladder scale for women/men). These results suggest that mitigating gender gaps potentially helps enhance well-being among individuals and societies rather than exacerbating tradeoffs between gender groups, arguably by ensuring women's opportunities and liberating men from social norms for their breadwinner role. We argue that gender equality plays an important role in achieving human and societal flourishing.