By Gabriel Armas-Cardona
Jim Yong Kim, the President of the World Bank Group,
recently made a call for improving the lives of women all around the world. He
said that one of the ways the World Bank is helping is by “collecting better data that measure equality for women and girls.”
Caucuses Research Resource Center (CRRC) recently conducted
two significant surveys. The first is the latest iteration of the flagship Caucasus Barometer, which is
an extensive annual survey in all three Caucasian countries. The second survey
is the Armenian portion of the latest wave of the World Values Survey. These two
surveys give us recent information about the status and perception of women and
their rights.
This will be the first post of a series on the subject, and
thus we’re going to start broadly examining the situation of women. Other
people have begun to study this issue. Katy Pearce, who has worked with CRRC
and the Caucasus Barometer data for a long time, has a post
that covers the work satisfaction felt by women in the Caucasus.
From International Women’s Day until Motherhood and Beauty
Day on April 7th is women’s month in Armenia. As all Armenian women
deserve happiness, we suggest a preliminary look at the picture of happiness and
satisfaction by gender. The graph below evidences some growth of happiness in
Armenia, especially for women during the last three years.
Women also report slightly more overall life satisfaction
than men, even if the level of satisfaction is only at the middle part of the
graph.
Delving further into what other factors may make women more
or less happy or satisfied finds differences in age, marital status and
education level. The charts for life satisfaction look similar to the charts
for happiness, so only the happiness charts will be reviewed below.
Age
Marital Status
Education
For both happiness and life satisfaction, women that were
18-35 years old, either never married or currently married, or completed higher
education or held a Ph.D. tended to score higher than other women. From 2011 to
2012, women that were 36-55 years old, never married, or hadn't completed
secondary education showed the most significant improvements in happiness and
life satisfaction. No difference was found in happiness between women based on
settlement type (capital, urban or rural), and only a small difference in life
satisfaction with women in the capital being more satisfied than urban or rural
women.
Even without knowing if there are causative factors,
recommendations can be made based on the strong correlations presented. The
first is for women to obtain the highest amount of education possible;
education lasts a lifetime and is well correlated to higher levels of happiness
and satisfaction. The second is for women to be willing to delay getting
married until they really want to; unmarried adult women report only a tiny amount
more happiness compared to married women but significantly more life
satisfaction.
Happiness and overall life satisfaction cover only the
broadest aspects of women’s lives in Armenia. Yet, these two subjective scores
demonstrate that women overall feel that their lot is improving, even if only a
little bit. There are many challenges Armenian women face, including lack of
economic opportunities, gender-based violence, expectations for boys and girls,
etc. These challenges will be developed in future blog posts.
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