Why are Liberal Women so Unhappy?
It’s time to embrace conservative approaches to well-being
by LUCIAN G. CONWAYFebruary 27, 2025, 10:11 PM
Feminist demonstration (MandriaPix/Shutterstock)
Some truths do not care if you are liberal or conservative. Two plus two still equals four no matter which side of the aisle you sit on. Gravity will pull Republicans and Democrats downwards at the same rate.
Some psychological truths are equally impartial. All people everywhere want their lives to have meaning. All people everywhere feel the need to fit in. If you do not have those things, you will likely be unhappy. That is true whether you voted for Trump or Harris.
However, those same immutable truths may be better grasped by one side than the other. If liberals were especially good at math, it would not change the underlying principles of addition — but it might be worth asking why liberals were so good at it.
In the case of mental and physical well-being, conservatives clearly have something figured out that liberals can learn from. These psychological facts have been highlighted by recent research showing that liberal women are unhappy. Indeed, one study showed that liberal female adolescents were especially prone to increases in depression. Even more recently, a just-published report from the 2024 American Family Survey revealed that liberal women are among the most unhappy people in the country, with only 12 percent saying they are completely satisfied with their lives. Comparatively, conservative women reported being over three times more satisfied. (LISTEN FOR MORE: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 114: Conservative Women Are Happier Than Liberal Women)
Why? Two factors accounted for roughly half of the gap between liberal and conservative women in the 2024 survey: Church attendance and marriage. These factors undoubtedly play into the immutable twin needs for meaning and belongingness I mentioned at the outset. In the words of the study authors: “[The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives] seems to flow from the fact that liberal young women are less likely to be integrated into core American institutions — specifically marriage and religion — that lend meaning, direction, and a sense of solidarity to women’s lives … [L]ower levels of marriage and churchgoing among liberal women may also have a hand in their elevated reports of loneliness, which, in turn, diminishes their odds of being happy.”
These data dovetail with a decades-long body of evidence that reveals conservatives show higher mental and physical well-being than liberals across the board. The trend isn’t going away, and it isn’t just in the U.S. — a recent study in Finland showed the conservative mental health advantage held even when accounting for potential measurement bias, and two studies in Australia showed conservatives engaging in healthier physical behaviors than liberals. (READ MORE: The Curious Case of Conservative Happiness)
This isn’t a psychological accident. Conservatives generally hold a whole host of psychological traits associated with better well-being. Not only are they more religious and more likely to be married, but they also have associated traits like a strong belief in personal accountability/agency and individual emotional stability.
Importantly, these traits can be isolated independent of politics, and the isolated mechanisms have shown positive effects on well-being around the world. For example, Tay and colleagues reviewed evidence from all over the globe concerning religiosity and concluded that it “points to a pan-cultural positive relation between religiosity and subjective well-being.” Similarly, a recent meta-analysis across many nations concluded that traits associated with personal resiliency were predictive of well-being.
Highlighting the mechanisms by which conservatives are happier reveals that the lessons learned by studying them are not just for conservatives. Indeed, one recent study from Australian researcher Eugene Chan showed this quite creatively by randomly assigning people of various political orientations to be subtly primed with conservative (e.g., “traditional”) or liberal (e.g., “left-wing”) words. Participants primed with conservative words subsequently showed more inclination towards healthy behaviors, and they did so largely because the priming made them experience more personal autonomy. In the words of the author:“f a conservative political orientation can be primed, it might be a viable way, alternative to priming personal responsibility, to promote healthy actions.”
I’m not suggesting we go around priming people to become more politically conservative. Rather, I want to make a different point. This and other recent research brings the current state of my own field of psychology into stark relief. Academic psychologists, who are overwhelmingly more liberal than the populations they serve, have largely ignored the potential benefits of conservatism in their characterizations of conservative psychology.
Rather, they often assume instead that conservatives are psychologically diseased, using pathology-infused terms like xenophobia to describe them. Or they assume that any happiness they achieve comes from stepping on other people, like a bully who gets to eat candy that he stole. As I’ve argued elsewhere, these kinds of characterizations are largely askew of the mark. Conservatives are people, and people are not perfect, but a mass characterization of them as sociopathic, fear-based bullies is hard to reconcile with evidence.
The American Psychological Association’s mission statement reads: “Our mission is to promote the advancement, communication, and application of psychological science and knowledge to benefit society and improve lives.” Given this focus on “improving lives,” it behooves the extremely left-leaning group known as academic psychologists to get past their very large — and politically motivated — blind spot and focus on exactly what the underlying principles are that make conservatives consistently happier than liberals.
They should do this not because they want to make people conservative but rather because they want to make people happy and healthy. Liberals don’t have to personally embrace religion and marriage to acknowledge their potential psychological benefits. Unthinking dismissals of religion, marriage, personal agency, and resiliency aren’t just dismissals of conservative values; they are dismissals of things known to promote joyful and healthy lives. They are dismissals of things that might improve the health of vulnerable populations — including liberal young women.
It’s long past time that, rather than dismissing those things as a default, academic psychologists fully embrace the potential value of them to improve the mental and physical well-being of their constituents — regardless of their political orientation.
