The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Complicated Calculus of Careers and Children

A guest post from Sharon Lerner:

Of course abortion and birth control have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Women Are More Unhappy Than Ever

Women are unhappier than they have been in 35 years. So suggests a study released earlier this week by the National Bureau of Economics. Two economists at U Penn conducted an exhaustive study of happiness and found that women's "subjective well-being" has declined, "both absolutely and relatively to men," as they put it. In fact, though women have historically had higher self-reported levels of happiness than men, today women are... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)