Are all women about to jump off a cliff?

Seems like that’s what a flurry of new studies, articles, and opinion posts are saying.

An article on Elle.com contends that it’s been a “long, slow disappointment,” that women who fought for equal rights decades ago thought we’d be, well, equal by now.

The most talked about inequality is in the workplace: A UC Davis report found that of Califorina’s 400 largest public companies, only 15 had a female CEO and 118 had no female board members or executive officers.

The outspoken ladies on ABC’s The View discussed their theories, which included the fact that women today are expected not only to be successful in their careers, but to continue to be the primary childcare giver and run the home.

Marcus Buckingham’s piece on the Huffington Post pulls in happiness data by age and gender; not only do women become less happy as they get older, but men tend to become happier.

Buckingham’s follow-up post suggests that perhaps women are simply more honest now than they were years ago when asked similar happiness/satisfaction questions.

But above all else it seems, Buckingham’s theory hinges on the fact that women are much more stressed and much less focused on a single role than they were 40 -50 years ago. Women think their kids want more time with them, kids it turns out, just want their moms to have more energy and less stress.

So what are women stressed out about? For one, there’s a lot of pressure to be successful in their careers. After all, we’ve still got a long way to go to be “equal” to men in leadership roles in business and government.

My question is why does the success of women’s equality need to be defined only by how far up women move in a company?

There are a lot of great reasons why women should never want to be equal to men; crime rates are probably the best illustration of that. There’s got to be a mix of biology and society that causes women to commit fewer and less violent crimes than men. Isn’t that a success? Why don’t we study how to get men down to the crime rate of women?

Or how about women’s rate of enrollment in colleges and universities? Women passed men as the majority of students in the early ‘90s. We should declare victory for achieving that and continuing to climb percentage-wise. And shouldn’t men be trying to figure out why they aren’t attending?Women also face the pressure to be “beautiful” which of course shifts as the decades pass, but they nevertheless are expected to conform. And women will be the first to say that they spend hours on their hair, put on makeup, strap on heels, and spend loads of money on nice clothes all to gain attention and admiration from other women more than men.

Singer Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater” captures this jealousy/desire sentiment precisely: “Hey everybody look at me / […] You either wanna be with me or be me.” It’s all a giant competition. Didn’t women actually support each other at one time? The fact that I’m more likely to get into a catfight than make a new friend when I go out certainly doesn’t make me happy.

So what’s a girl to do? Well, I think ‘doing’ is actually the problem. Women (and men) get caught in the cycle of believing they’ll gain satisfaction through doing and acquiring things: The next promotion, a nice home, marrying, losing weight, getting out of debt, having children, etc. How about we just enjoy and feel blessed as we are instead of putting off happiness until the next goal or step? It’s cliché, but the more you have, the more you have to lose and boy do we have a lot these days. That’s got to cause a lot of anxiety about all those “what ifs."

What do you think the cause of this dip in happiness is?