Gender, Loneliness and Happiness during COVID-19

We analyse a measure of loneliness from a balanced sample of German individuals interviewed in both 2017 and at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Both men and women felt lonelier during the COVID-19 pandemic than they did in 2017. The pandemic more than doubled the gender loneliness gap: women were lonelier than men in 2017, and the 2017-2020 rise in loneliness was far larger for women. This rise is mirrored in life-satisfaction scores, which historically are often found to be higher for women. Men’s life satisfaction in 2017 and 2020 changed only little; yet that of women fell dramatically, and sufficiently so to invert the gender gap in life satisfaction. We estimate that almost all of this inversion is explained by the disproportionate rise in loneliness for women during the COVID-19 pandemic.