In Brazil, nearly six in 10 women said they felt stressed most of the previous day, compared with just under four in 10 men.
An annual survey by polling institute Gallup indicates that women around the world have gotten angrier over the past 10 years. But why is this happening?
Two years ago, Tahsha Renee was standing in her kitchen when an uncontrollable feeling of anger came over her: she ended up screaming at the top of her lungs.
“Anger has always been an easy emotion to exploit,” she says.
But Tahsha had never felt anything like it.
It was in the middle of the pandemic and she was fed up. She had spent the previous 20 minutes walking around the house listing out loud everything that made her angry.
But after the scream he felt an intense physical release.
Tahsha, a hypnotherapist and life coach, has since brought together women from all over the world on Zoom to talk about whatever makes them angry and then vent.
According to a BBC survey of 10 years of Gallup World Poll data, women are getting more cranky.
Each year, the survey interviews more than 120,000 people in over 150 countries, asking, among other things, what emotions they felt during much of the previous day.
When it comes to negative feelings specifically — anger, sadness, stress, and worry — women report feeling them more often than men.
Analysis from the BBC found that since 2012, more women than men reported feeling sad and worried, although this has increased for both genders.
However, when it comes to anger and stress, the gap with men is widening. In 2012, both genders reported anger and stress at similar levels. Nine years later, the women are angrier — by a margin of six percentage points — and more stressed out, too. And there has been a particular variation at the time of the pandemic.
This is not surprising to American therapist Sarah Harmont. In early 2021, she brought together a group of female patients to scream together.
“I’m a mother of two young children and have been working from home. I had deep and intense frustration that was turning into full-blown anger,” she says.
A year later, she entered the field again. “That was the cry that went viral,” she says. It was picked up by a reporter in one of the online groups her mother was a member of, and within an hour Sarah started getting phone numbers from reporters around the world.
She believes it tapped into something women around the world were feeling, an intense frustration that the brunt of the pandemic was falling disproportionately on them.
A 2020 survey of nearly 5,000 parents in heterosexual relationships in England found that mothers took on more household responsibilities during lockdown than fathers. As a result, they have reduced their working hours. This happened even when they were the highest earners in the family.
In some countries, the difference between women and men who say they felt angry the day before is much greater than the global average.
In Cambodia the difference was 17 percentage points in 2021, while in India and Pakistan it was 12.
Psychiatrist Lakshmi Vijayakumar believes this is a result of the tensions that have arisen as more women in these countries have become educated, employed and financially independent.
“At the same time, they are bound by archaic, patriarchal systems and culture,” she says. “The dissonance between a patriarchal system at home and an empowered woman outside the home causes a lot of anger.”
Every Friday evening during rush hour in Chennai, India witness this dynamic in action.
“You see men relaxing, going to a tea house, smoking. And you find women running to the bus or train station. They are thinking about what to cook. Many women start cutting vegetables on their way home in the morning. train .”
In the past, Lakshmi says, it wasn’t appropriate for women to say they were angry, but that is changing. “Now there’s a little more capacity to express one’s emotions, so the anger is greater.”
The effect of the pandemic on women’s work could also have an impact. Before 2020, there was slow progress in women’s labor force participation, according to Ginette Azcona, data scientist at UN Women.
But in 2020 it stopped. This year, the number of women in work is expected to be below 2019 levels in 169 countries.
Progress for women?
To mark the 10th anniversary of BBC 100 Women, the BBC commissioned Savanta ComRes to ask women from 15 countries to compare today with 10 years ago.
- At least half of women surveyed in each country say they feel more empowered to make their own financial decisions than they did 10 years ago
- At least half in all countries other than the United States and Pakistan also think it’s easier for women to discuss consent with a romantic partner.
- In most countries, at least two-thirds of women surveyed said that social media had a positive impact on their lives; in the US and UK, however, the percentage was less than 50%.
- In 12 out of 15 countries, 40% or more of women surveyed say freedom to express their opinions is an area where their lives have made the most progress in the last 10 years
- 46% of US respondents believe it is more difficult for women to access medically safe abortion than it was 10 years ago
“We have a gender-segregated job market,” says American feminist author Soraya Chemaly, who wrote about anger in her 2019 book, Rage Becomes Her.
She sees much of the pandemic-related burnout happening in female-dominated industries like health care.
“It’s pseudo-maternal, underpaid work. These people report very high levels of repressed, repressed, deflected anger. And it has a lot to do with an expectation to work tirelessly. And without any kind of legitimate boundaries.”
“Similar dynamics are often found in heterosexual marriage,” she says.
Much has been written in the United States about the burden of the pandemic on women, but the results of the Gallup World Poll do not indicate that women are angrier than men.
“Women in America feel a deep sense of shame about anger,” Chemaly points out, and may be more likely to report their anger as stress or sadness.
Perhaps that’s why American women report higher levels of stress and sadness than men.
This is also true elsewhere. Far more women than men reported being stressed in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Cyprus and Greece.
In Brazil, more specifically, nearly six in 10 women said they felt stressed for much of the previous day, compared with just under four in 10 men.
Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador also saw a large difference between the sexes. In Bolivia and Ecuador, nearly half of women said they felt sad most of the previous day, 15 percentage points more than men.
The trend for women to report negative emotions more often than men dates back to at least 2012 in these countries and appears to be getting worse in many.
But Tahsha Renee thinks many women in the United States and elsewhere have reached a point where they can say, “Enough!”
“In a way that’s really facilitating change. And they’re using their anger to do that,” she says.
“It takes fury and rage,” agrees UN Women’s Ginette Azcona. “Sometimes you need it to shake things up and get people to pay attention and listen.”
Methodology
Gallup surveys more than 120,000 people each year in more than 150 countries and areas, representing more than 98 percent of the world’s adult population, using randomly selected, nationally representative samples. Interviews are conducted in person or by telephone. The margin of error for the results varies by country and by question. When sample sizes are smaller, such as when dividing a set of responses by gender, the margin of error will be greater. Full tables of data for the 2021 Gallup Poll can be downloaded here.
Savanta ComRes interviewed 15,723 women over the age of 18 online in Egypt (1,067), Kenya (1,022), Nigeria (1,018), Mexico (1,109), USA (1,042), Brazil (1,008), China (1,025), India (1,107), Indonesia (1,061), Pakistan (1,006), Saudi Arabia (1,012), Russia (1,010), Turkey (1,160), United Kingdom (1,067) and Ukraine (1,009) between 17 October and 16 November 2022. data were weighted to be representative of women in each country by age and region. The margin of error for each country’s results is +/- 3. Full tables of data are available here.
BBC 100 Women annually nominates 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world.
Data Journalism by Liana Bravo, Christine Jeanavans and Helena Rosiecka🇧🇷 With mention of Valeria Perasso and Georgina Pearce
– This text was published in https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-63886886
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Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
