Priscilla Du Preez / Unsplash
CV NEWS FEED // Research released in early February reveals that young conservative women are significantly happier and more satisfied with life compared to their liberal peers.
The 2024 American Family Survey found that 37% of conservative women report being “completely satisfied” with life – three times the rate of their liberal counterparts, among whom only 12% say the same.
Meanwhile, liberal women are two-to-three times more likely to express dissatisfaction with their lives than conservative women.
This trend holds even after accounting for factors like age, education, race, and income.
Grant Bailey and Brad Wilcox of the Institute for Family Studies believe that the happiness gap likely flows from marriage and religion, two areas “that lend meaning, direction, and a sense of solidarity to women’s lives.”
According to the survey, conservative women aged 18-40 are married at a rate 20 percentage points higher than their liberal counterparts, and over half of conservative women in the same age group “attend church weekly,” compared to just “12% of their liberal peers.”
These factors could account for nearly half of the ideological divide in life satisfaction.
“We are social animals and being married, having a family, is … a source of enormous meaning and purpose,” Wilcox told Fox News Digital. “Just the fact that conservative women are more likely to be married … is a big reason why they’re also more likely to be satisfied with their lives in general.”
He also noted that conservative women are more likely to acknowledge biological differences between men and women, which may contribute to their overall happier marriages.
Multiple studies have confirmed the trend since 2020, when researcher Zach Goldberg, analyzing Pew data, first uncovered that white liberal women reported mental health conditions more frequently than any other group surveyed.
The finding was confirmed by a 2022 study, which noted that trends in mental health diverged based on certain political beliefs.
Wilcox observed: “We’ve seen in the research that conservative women tend to be more likely to embrace a sense of agency and to have the sense that they are not, in any way, the victim of larger structural realities or forces.”
