Gender, Loneliness and Happiness during COVID-19
Anthony Lepinteur,
Andrew Clark,
Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell,
Alan Piper,
Carsten Schröder and
Conchita D'Ambrosio
No 1178, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)
Abstract:
We analyse a measure of loneliness from a representative sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for women. This rise is mirrored in life-satisfaction scores. Men’s life satisfaction changed only little between 2017 and 2020; yet that of women fell dramatically, and sufficiently so to produce a female penalty in life satisfaction. We estimate that almost all of this female penalty is explained by the disproportionate rise in loneliness for women during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: Loneliness; Life Satisfaction; Gender; COVID-19; SOEP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I14 I18 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 p.
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.862514.de/diw_sp1178.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Gender, loneliness and happiness during COVID-19 (2022) 
Working Paper: Gender, Loneliness and Happiness during COVID-19 (2022) 
Working Paper: Gender, loneliness and happiness during COVID-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Gender, loneliness and happiness during COVID-19 (2022)
Working Paper: Gender, Loneliness and Happiness during COVID-19 (2022) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1178
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().