A study reveals that in more gender-equal societies, boys report higher well-being, widening the gender gap, while girls’ subjective happiness remains unchanged, a paradox challenging assumptions about equality and happiness.
A 2022 study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that the gap in teenagers’ subjective well-being tends to be wider in countries with higher levels of gender equality, a result that has drawn attention because it appears to run counter to expectations. Drawing on OECD Programme for International Student Assessment data from 941,475 15-year-olds in 78 countries in 2015 and 2018, the researchers found that the pattern held across measures including life satisfaction, positive feelings and negative feelings. The work is about population-level trends, not individual diagnosis, and the OECD has long treated adolescent well-being as a multi-dimensional issue that covers life satisfaction, school experience and emotional health.
The most important detail is that girls’ well-being did not visibly fall as equality rose. Instead, boys’ well-being improved, and that shift accounted for much of the widening gap. In the study’s models, the link between gender equality and life satisfaction was stronger for boys than for girls, suggesting that the so-called paradox is less about girls doing worse and more about boys doing better in more equal societies. The OECD’s own PISA reports on student well-being underscore that these measures are broad and sensitive to how young people experience school, home life and social relationships, which helps explain why subjective outcomes do not always move in step with legal or economic progress.
The authors offer a social comparison explanation. In more unequal societies, teenagers may compare themselves mainly with peers of the same sex. As societies become more gender-equal, that frame of reference may broaden, bringing comparisons with the opposite sex into sharper view. Because boys still tend to hold a somewhat stronger average socioeconomic position even in more equal countries, the comparison may shift in ways that lift boys’ self-assessments while leaving girls more aware of the gap between promise and reality. That interpretation is consistent with the study’s broader claim that objective equality and subjective happiness do not always advance at the same pace.
The finding is not entirely new. A 2018 study led by Margaretha de Looze in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, using data from 32 European and North American countries, found no widening gender gap. But when Jiesi Guo’s team re-ran its analysis on the same countries, the results pointed in the same direction as the earlier work, just with more statistical precision. The two studies were not meaningfully at odds, and when their effect sizes were combined, the overall result was significant. Even so, the evidence remains correlational rather than proof that equality itself causes the gap. The policy lesson is narrower: expanding rights and opportunities for girls matters, but it may not by itself produce a matching rise in how girls feel about their lives.
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