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The gender equality paradox has a disquieting finding at its centre: in the countries that have done the most to close the gap between men and women, adolescent girls are measurably less happy than adolescent boys, a pattern that grows more pronounced the higher a nation’s equality score climbs
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Jiesi Guo and a team of colleagues across five countries published the paper behind this finding in 2022, in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
Girls’ wellbeing did not decline as national gender equality rose.
Boys’ wellbeing rose, and rose by a statistically significant margin, as country-level gender equality increased.
In societies with more rigid, distinct gender roles, the research they build on suggests people mostly compare themselves to others of the same gender.
What I’d take from thisWhat stays with me isn’t the word paradox, which makes this sound stranger than the mechanism actually is.