How do happiness levels among women vary across OECD countries?
Executive summary
Across OECD countries, average happiness (World Happiness Report/WHP measure) is around 6.7 on a 0–10 scale (2024 average across 38 countries: 6.69) with Finland the highest (7.74) and Turkey the lowest among OECD listings (4.98) [1]. OECD reporting and its Better Life Index show that life satisfaction differences by gender are generally small on average in OECD countries, but important cross-country gender gaps exist: some countries have men happier, others women happier [2] [3].
1. Global scoreboard: what the headline numbers say
The most widely used international ranking — the World Happiness Report scores averaged for recent years — places the OECD cluster around a mean of roughly 6.7 on a 0–10 life‑satisfaction scale; Finland tops the list with about 7.74 while Turkey sits near the bottom at about 4.98 in the 2024/2025 data snapshot [1] [4]. The WHP averages respondents’ answers to a single life‑satisfaction question and is the basis for most cross‑country comparisons cited by policy analysts and media [4].
2. Gender differences: “small on average, big in places”
The OECD’s Society at a Glance finds that, when averaged across OECD countries, men and women report similar life satisfaction levels — but that masks substantial national variation: in Denmark and Lithuania men report higher satisfaction than women, while in Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Türkiye women report higher satisfaction than men [2]. The OECD Better Life Index also explicitly tracks well‑being by gender, indicating that the organisation treats gender disaggregation as central to understanding well‑being differences [3] [5].
3. Why gender gaps appear: institutions, norms and measurement
OECD research links gender‑based discrimination in social institutions to lower life satisfaction for both sexes and estimates that eradicating such discrimination would substantially reduce the share of people reporting very low life satisfaction (from about 14% to 5% globally in the cited analysis) [6] [7]. That work frames gender gaps not only as individual outcomes but as the product of laws, norms and institutional barriers captured by indices such as the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) [6] [7].
4. Measurement matters: what “happiness” actually is in these datasets
The OECD and WHP rely chiefly on self‑reported life‑satisfaction questions and have published guidance to improve comparability; the OECD 2025 update of its Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well‑being underscores differences between affective states (calm, happiness) and evaluative life satisfaction and stresses survey design choices that can shift results [8] [9]. Analysts caution that cultural response styles and survey modes can create country‑level effects that are hard to disentangle from substantive differences in well‑being [10].
5. Patterns and policy levers: equality, social ties and care
OECD analysis links higher well‑being to greater gender equality in institutions: countries with fewer discriminatory social institutions score higher on life satisfaction and would see notable declines in “unhappiness” if discrimination were reduced [7] [6]. The World Happiness Report’s 2025 theme — caring and sharing — highlights how social support and reciprocity shape happiness, signalling policy areas (care systems, social protection, equality) that affect both men’s and women’s reported life satisfaction [4].
6. Caveats and competing perspectives
Available sources show consistent signals but also warn about interpretation limits: cross‑country averages hide within‑country heterogeneity by age, education and other demographics [2]. Measurement guidance (OECD 2025) explicitly notes that different subjective well‑being constructs (calm vs. happiness vs. life satisfaction) and survey methods can yield divergent findings [8] [9]. Sources do not provide a single, exhaustive table of women’s happiness by OECD country in the materials supplied here — country‑by‑gender scores are described in aggregate and by examples, not as a complete dataset in these snippets [2] [3].
7. Bottom line for readers and policymakers
Women’s happiness across OECD countries cannot be summarized as uniformly higher or lower than men’s: on average the gap is small, but national patterns vary and are linked to institutional gender equality, social support and measurement choices [2] [6] [4]. Policymakers seeking to raise women’s life satisfaction should target discriminatory institutions and strengthen care and social networks — steps the OECD and World Happiness reporting identify as influential [7] [4].
Limitations: this summary relies on the provided OECD and World Happiness Report materials and related syntheses; the supplied sources do not include a full, country‑by‑country table of female life‑satisfaction scores within OECD membership in the excerpts given [1] [2] [3].