Women across the globe have been getting angrier by the year over the past decade, according to new data today.
Since 2012, the Gallup World Poll has surveyed more than 120,000 people in more than 150 countries each year, asking participants several lifestyle questions, including what emotions they felt for much of the previous day.
When it came to bad feelings such as stress, worry, anger and sadness, women persistently reported feeling these more often than men.
Despite an upward rise of these feelings tracked in both sexes, women continue to be the angrier cohort — especially during the pandemic, when they suffered in female-dominated industries like healthcare and childcare, and disproportionally took on the majority of the added domestic duties.
In some countries, such as Cambodia, which ranked 89th out of 146 on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index in 2020, the difference in the number of women and men who reported feeling angry the previous day was at 17 per cent — much higher than the world average of 6 per cent.
Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her, believes the findings demonstrate a sex-segregated labour market.
“It’s pseudo-maternal work and poorly paid,” she told BBC, referring to the work women tend to take on. “These people register very high levels of repressed, suppressed and diverted anger. And it has a lot to do with being expected to work tirelessly. And with no kind of legitimate boundaries.”
“Similar dynamics are often found in heterosexual marriage.”
Chemaly added that some women feel shame about anger, and as a result, are likelier to report their anger as stress or sadness.
The latest findings from the Gallup data confirms similar results from a 2020 survey by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in England which found mothers assumed more domestic duties during lockdown than fathers, resulting in women having to reduce their paid working hours.
Mothers who earned more than the fathers in a household were not exempt from this trend.
Psychiatrist and founder of SNEHA, an NGO in Chennai for the prevention of suicide, Dr Lakshmi Vijayakumar, observed that women are being “tethered down by archaic, patriarchal systems and culture,” in places like India.
“The dissonance between a patriarchal system at home and an emancipated woman outside of home causes a lot of anger,” she said.
“[In India], you see the men relax, going to a tea shop, having a smoke. And you find the women hurrying to the bus or train station. They’re thinking about what to cook. Many women start chopping vegetables on their way back home on the train.”
An independent study commissioned by BBC interviewed women across 15 countries about the last decade and found that things are improving for women in some ways.
The study found that 50 per cent of women feel more equipped to make their own financial decisions than 10 years ago, while two-thirds said social media had made a positive impact on their lives.
Barring the US and Pakistan, roughly half of women said they felt more comfortable discussing consent with a romantic partner.
Across 12 countries, 40 per cent of women said they feel freer to express their views, compared to a decade ago.
Ginette Azcona, a data scientist at UN Women observed that prior to 2020, women’s participation in the workforce had been on an upward trend, though it halted during the pandemic.
According to Azcona, the number of women participating in paid employment in 2022 is projected to be lower than what was recorded in 2019.
Commenting on the Gallup’s findings, which also found that American women reported higher levels of stress and sadness than American men, Azcona said women “need rage and anger” to “shake things up.”
“In a way that’s actually facilitating change. And [women are] using their anger to do it,” she said. “Sometimes you need these, to have people pay attention and listen.”
Once you consider the events that have occurred this year across the globe – Iran’s clerical regime which actively denies women full human rights, the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US, Indonesia’s decision to criminalise sex before marriage, the regression of abortion rights in Poland – among many others ( not to mention the persistent gender pay gap!), you can start to see why women might be getting angrier by the year.