The Happiness Gap is back is back is back is back

Article here. Excerpt:

'What may be the most widely-discussed statistical over-interpretation in history is coming around for the third time. The first gust front of commentary blew in with David Leonhardt in the NYT Business Section in September of 2007, echoed a few days later by Steven Leavitt in the Freakonomics blog. In May of 2009, Ross Douthat's NYT column recycled the same research for another round of thumb-sucking. And the same material has just been promoted again by Arianna Huffington...
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People love this story. They love to speculate about the reasons for the trend — the favorites are variants of "too much feminism" and "not enough feminism" — and to tell us about their own happiness or lack thereof. Tens of thousands of readers, across the repeated reprises of this story in the mass media, have commented on various newspaper and weblog sites. In a certain sense, this tidal wave of response validates the story, which clearly resonates with something in the spirit of the times. But in fact, the empirical basis for all this fuss is so thin as to be practically non-existent.
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To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men … have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives." Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading. Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females. But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.'