Assessing and decomposing gender differences in evaluative and emotional well-being among older adults in the developing world

Using data from the World Health Organization’s Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (SAGE), we evaluate the relationship between gender and several measures of subjective well-being among older adults in developing countries. Furthermore, we contrast the partial associations of gender with these well-being measures when controlling only for age ( age-adjusted analyses) with the corresponding partial associations when including individual characteristics and life circumstances as controls ( multivariable-adjusted analyses). While age-adjusted analyses reveal that older women have lower levels of evaluative well-being than older men, multivariable-adjusted analyses show that - given similar life circumstances - they have equal or slightly higher evaluative well-being. This suggests that the gender gap in evaluative well-being may be explained by less favorable life circumstances of older women. Age-adjusted results also show that older women tend to have lower levels of emotional well-being. However, we find no reversal, but merely an attenuation of these gender differences in emotional well-being when controlling for additional individual characteristics and life circumstances. Finally, we perform Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to disaggregate the gender gaps in well-being into explained parts - attributable to gender differences in individual characteristics and life circumstances - and unexplained parts - related to gender differences in the association between life circumstances and subjective well-being. These results further corroborate our findings that women tend to be disadvantaged in terms of both evaluative and emotional well-being, and that this disadvantage is mostly driven by observable factors related to the explained part of the decomposition, such as gender differences in socio-economic status and health.