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Career Women at Midlife: Sadder and Sicker

While women are securing greater power in the workplace, they are also growing less satisfied with their lives as they age

Kathy Caprino’s life seemed the stuff of glossy-magazine perfection. The big deal marketing job, complete with roomy office, upbeat assistant, and lunchtime indulgences in retail therapy. The cool contemporary spread in Connecticut. The emotionally aware jazz percussionist husband frolicking with the two healthy kids.

What a photo spread: a mise en scène of Third Wave feminisism, writ fabulous. Only as she powered through her prime earning years, notching promotions and amplifying her assets, Caprino began to ask herself why she felt lost and angry all of the time. She developed a chronic case of tracheitis. Life became about snapping at her husband, falling asleep around her kids, and loathing the deadened corporate machine she had become. At 38, Kathy Caprino had it all. She was also the unhappiest and unhealthiest she had ever been.

“The midlife crisis for women, you don’t hear about it so much,” says Caprino. “Life was becoming impossible and intolerable, and I had no idea why.”

But to some researchers, Caprino’s story makes perfect sense—and is all too common. Statistics from six recent major happiness studies reveal that as women grow older, they become, on average, sicker and sadder. This drop in happiness occurs regardless of whether women are married, have kids, are divorced, work incessantly, or live a life of leisure. Whether they are rich or poor. Gorgeous or average. Tall or short. American, Asian, or European. The trend holds true across the board, with the single exception that African American woman report being happier than they were in 1972. (For men, the surveys show, the opposite is true: they grow more satisfied with life as they age.)

“Over the last 50 years, women have secured greater opportunity, greater achievement, greater influence, and more money. But over the same time period, they have become less happy, more anxious, more stressed, and, in ever-increasing numbers, they are medicating themselves for it,” says management thinker and author Marcus Buckingham, who tackles the subject in his upcoming book, due out in September: Find Your Strongest Life: What the Most Successful and Resilient Women Do Differently. “Better education and job opportunities and freedoms have decreased life happiness for women.”

Feeling All Wrong

At first it seems counterintuitive. But then one need only look to the legions of 40’ish women who are popping Ambiens and antidepressants, contending with chronic health issues, and feeling all wrong but not having a clue as to why. Sociologists are finding that once women hit their 40s, contemporary life becomes slippery. This is black ice few are talking about.