Women are getting angrier, according to a BBC analysis of 10 years of data from the Gallup World Poll.
More than 120,000 people in more than 150 nations are surveyed by Gallup every year about their emotions and the results are not particularly cheery. Women consistently report feeling negative emotions more than men and, since 2012, more women than men report feeling sad and worried.
While men are not exactly doing great — both genders report feeling more worried than they did a decade ago — there is a widening gender rage gap.
The rage gap is particularly extreme in some nations. In India, for example, 40.6 percent of women said they felt anger during a lot of the previous day last year compared with 27.8 percent of men. Those numbers are up from about 30 percent (women) and 26 percent (men) in 2012.
The gender rage gap was also more striking during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic across many nations.
I am sure none of this comes as a surprise: there is a lot for women to be angry about. For the last few years it has felt like progress has been going backward. In the US, Roe v Wade was overturned, of course, and women lost hard-won abortion rights. The election of former US president Donald Trump in 2016 was also a major moment for female anger: a misogynist who boasted about grabbing women by the pussy became the most powerful person in the world.
The pandemic has also been disproportionately hard on women, driving millions of mothers out of the workforce to take on childcare duties. A global study found that, on average, women did three times as much childcare as men during the pandemic. A lot of men shrugged and assumed their wife would just take care of things because that is what women do, don’t they?
“We owe mums everywhere an enormous debt of thanks for ... juggling childcare and work at this tricky time,” then-British chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak, who is now British prime minister, said early last year.
As a piece in the Guardian pointed out: “That statement jumps right into the complacent myth that women will always be there to care — and never want any reward but love.”
The murder of Sarah Everard, who was abducted and killed by a police officer as she walked home from a friend’s house in London, was another flashpoint for female anger. After Everard disappeared, police officers went door to door in south London telling women to stay at home for their own safety, prompting anger about victim-blaming.
Everard’s murder sparked a nationwide reckoning with male violence in the UK and a conversation about how normalized fear is for women.
While women have a lot to be angry about, there are also reasons for optimism.
The fact that women seem increasingly comfortable admitting that they are angry is a good thing in itself. Women, after all, are socialized to be nice; every woman on earth has been told to smile by some random man. One survey found that 98 percent of women have been told to smile at work; 15 percent reported that they are told to smile weekly. (The survey was done by a direct-to-consumer dental alignment company, I should note, so may not be 100 percent scientific, but you get the idea.)
Men have always been allowed to lose their cool; women, particularly minorities, get punished for it. Studies show that by the time most children are toddlers they associate angry expressions with male faces.
As Soraya Chemaly, the author of Rage Becomes Her, has written: “Anger is considered a marker of masculinity.”
Anger can be corrosive, but if channeled correctly, it can also be a powerful catalyst for change. The #MeToo movement, for example, was born out of anger; all social movements are. So let us embrace the fact that women are getting angrier, shall we? What would really be rage-inducing was if everyone was happy with current status quo.
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