PATRIARCHY STRIKES AGAIN: Study: Job authority increases depression symptoms in women, decreases them in men.

“Women with job authority—the ability to hire, fire, and influence pay—have significantly more symptoms of depression than women without this power,” said Tetyana Pudrovska, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and the lead author of the study. “In contrast, men with job authority have fewer symptoms of depression than men without such power.”

Titled, “Gender, Job Authority, and Depression,” the study, which appears in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, considers more than 1,300 middle-aged men and 1,500 middle-aged women, who graduated from high schools in Wisconsin. . . .

“What’s striking is that women with job authority in our study are advantaged in terms of most characteristics that are strong predictors of positive mental health,” said Pudrovska. “These women have more education, higher incomes, more prestigious occupations, and higher levels of job satisfaction and autonomy than women without job authority. Yet, they have worse mental health than lower-status women.”

Of course, discrimination is identified as the cause. And, like clockwork, the researcher says that “we need to address gender [sic] discrimination, hostility, and prejudice against women leaders to reduce the psychological costs and increase the psychological rewards of higher-status jobs for women.”

But women, moreso than men, prefer male bosses. If anything, this call for addressing discrimination against women is yet another case of feminism running up against the preferences of women.