Who Gets to Flourish?
In this month’s issue of The Evidence newsletter, Josephine Lethbridge examines how gender shapes experiences of human flourishing.
A recently published international survey sheds new light on one of humanity’s oldest debates: what does it mean to flourish?
The Global Flourishing Study, which gathered responses from over 200,000 people in 22 countries, aimed to quantify this question by asking participants about six key areas: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.
The results show that men and women report similar levels of overall flourishing, with men averaging a score of 7.19 and women 7.12 out of 10. However, their routes to reaching these scores often differ: women score higher in relationships, happiness, and purpose while men tend to do better in health and financial security.
People who identified their gender as “other” reported markedly lower levels of well-being, at an average of 6.12. This finding raises serious concerns about the quality of life for gender-diverse people globally.
Analyzing the data by country
Japan and Brazil stand out for having the largest gender gaps in reported well-being—but in opposite directions: in Japan, women flourish more than men, while in Brazil, the reverse is true.
Offering insight into Japan’s results, Kyoto University’s Yukiko Uchida considers how determinants of well-being may differ by gender.
“Men’s happiness appears to be more strongly tied to socioeconomic status,” says Uchida, “whereas women’s happiness is more closely linked to social relationships.” Women, then, are more likely to flourish in Japan’s “interdependent cultural context, where well-being is often rooted in harmonious social connections.”
In Brazil, Ligia Carolina Oliveira-Silva of the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia explains how structural factors “disproportionately affect women’s mental health.” Women perform more unpaid care work, limiting their access to paid employment, leisure, and self-care.
Oliveira-Silva urges a decolonial rethinking of flourishing, noting that many Brazilian women favor interdependence, cultural survival, and dignity over individual success. “[A]ddressing the gender gap in flourishing in Brazil,” she writes “will demand comprehensive social, economic, and policy transformations.”
Read this month’s full newsletter to learn more about how gender influences flourishing—and how cultural contexts may shape these outcomes. An archive of past issues can be accessed through Social Science Space.
