1.  The Effects of Gender Discrimination on Mental Health

 

The Effects of Gender Discrimination on Mental Health

No one likes to feel discriminated against or like they are being treated unfairly, but discrimination extends beyond an uncomfortable or irritable annoyance.

Over time, these unjust actions and behaviors can lead to serious problems including those related to the person’s mental health.

The Connection Between Gender Discrimination & Mental Health

As a mental health facility in Florida, we know that mental health disorders often stem from a variety of contributing factors. Many people talk about how childhood traumas or chronic stress can negatively impact mental health, but there are several other causes for mental illness. One possible factor that is not often talked about is how sexism and gender discrimination affect mental health.

While gender discrimination may seem mostly innocuous to some, severe and frequent discrimination may have lasting effects. A research study found that gender discrimination and poor mental health may be connected. The study found that women who reported sex discrimination were found to be three times as likely to see a decline in their mental health over the next four years including experiencing clinical depression.¹ Even though the sex discrimination may have stopped, these women were experiencing negative mental health effects years later.

Another study found that verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual assault on flight attendants was associated with higher rates of depression.² While a side comment or inappropriate physical contact may seem irrelevant to some, these actions may be meaningful to the subject and wear on their mental health. If sexism were reduced, we may also see a decline in mental health problems.

The Effects of Gender Discrimination on Mental Health & Addiction

Unfortunately, the negative effects of gender discrimination on mental health may also eventually lead to a substance abuse problem. As people struggle to deal with their mental health appropriately, they may turn to drugs or alcohol to try and self-medicate. Research suggests that racial and gender discrimination leads to significantly increased risk of alcohol abuse in women and drug abuse in men.³ Without co-occurring disorder treatment, this substance abuse often makes their mental health problems worse. This connection could account for the why mental health continues to decline as years pass.

No one should have to deal with a mental illness on their own. At Banyan Mental Health, we offer various mental health treatment programs that area designed to help patients not only better manage their symptoms, but work toward normal lives.

          

Delivering On The Promise Of Gender Equity In India: Lessons From The UDAYA Study

Gender equality is the sine qua non of multiple global goals, including poverty eradication, economic growth, global health, and education. The achievement of gender equality and empowerment of women and girls is one of the United Nations’ (UN’s) sustainable development goals (SDG 5). However, progress comes slowly, and in the five years since the goals were agreed to, the needle hasn’t moved substantially. This is especially true of low- and middle-income countries such as India, which placed 112th out of 153 countries on the Global Gender Gap Report 2020.  

Understanding what enables adolescent girls to transition successfully to adulthood can help inform early investments, helping them reach their full potential. One way to do this is to adjust the design and delivery of education and public health services to drive more gender-equitable outcomes, drawing upon evidence of what works. A missing piece of the puzzle is that gender-disaggregated data are often hard to come by—even more so for adolescents.

Understanding The Lives Of Adolescents And Young People

In an attempt to bridge some of this evidence gap, The Population Council (where I serve as a knowledge translation specialist) carried out a seminal panel study, Understanding the Lives of Adolescents and Young People (UDAYA). It was conducted in two of the most populous states of India (Uttar Pradesh and Bihar), which are home to one in sixteen adolescents in the world and offers a snapshot of how girls fare compared to boys over time. It also begins to provide possible explanations for why girls may be faring so much worse. UDAYA covers a broad swathe of domains that touch upon multiple facets of adolescents’ lives, such as their health, nutrition, and education status; uptake of government programs and entitlements; economic and civic participation; digital media use, and aspirations and agency.

The study participants were recruited in 2015 and were interviewed in two waves of survey, the first in 2015–16, and the second, three years later, in 2018–19. The first wave of survey was conducted among more than 20,000 boys and girls ages 10–19. About 16,000 adolescents and young adults were followed up in the second wave. Findings from the first round were widely disseminated in 2017 through roundtables, reports, policy briefs, and factsheets. The dissemination of the second round results is currently underway, and a virtual dissemination of study findings followed by a panel discussion was held in November 2020.

Through the UDAYA study, we’ve learned that adolescent girls face overlapping risks and vulnerabilities. In fact, the data paint a dreary picture, with the quality of transitions to adolescence and adulthood significantly worse for girls across a number of dimensions:

School Discontinuation

As girls grew older, they were more likely to discontinue schooling compared to boys. School discontinuation was markedly higher for married girls, who were least likely to be in school among the five different population groups studied (10–14-year-old boys, 10–14-year-old girls, 15–19-year-old boys, 15–19-year-old unmarried girls, and 15–19-year-old married girls).

Poor Learning Outcomes

Foundational literacy and numeracy were abysmal, especially for girls, with just two out of five girls (compared to three out of five boys), who had completed 12 years of schooling, both literate and numerate (assessed as the ability to read a “class 2” text in their native language and solve a simple division problem of three digits by two digits).

Work And Early Marriage

As girls aged, they were less likely to work for pay compared to boys, but much more likely to get married. As many as 13 percent of the girls were married by 18 years of age, compared to only 2 percent of boys. Married adolescent girls were also more likely to be depressed and cited domestic violence and childbearing-related issues as the primary stressors.

Adolescent Pregnancy

A staggering 9 in 10 teenaged girls who were married either at the time of the first survey (2015–16) or who got married in the inter-survey period had begun childbearing when followed up three years later (2018–19). A considerable proportion of these girls had also experienced pregnancy loss.

Being married and having children this early in life often means that any aspirations or alternate conceptions of adulthood that these girls may have had—whether in terms of continuing education or achieving remunerative work—must be forgone. As many as three in four married girls said that they did not achieve the level of education to which they had aspired. Furthermore, of the 28 percent of married girls who wanted to pursue an occupation at the time of initial survey, only 15 percent were engaged in paid work at the time of follow-up survey. This chasm in the aspirations and achievements of young girls, reflected in their lived experiences, is a poignant reminder of what we lose as a result of gender inequality. It also points to the need for evidence-informed investments to empower these girls to exercise choice in all their life decisions.

What are the vital links in the chain for girls to become empowered women? We offer a window into the plausible pathways that empower girls by improving their agency, thereby enhancing their overall well-being and life experience as they become young women.

Staying In School

Keeping girls in school has a multiplier effect on girls’ well-being. An increase in the number of years of schooling lowered the odds of child marriage, increased modern contraceptive use, shaped more gender egalitarian attitudes, improved foundational learning outcomes, and reduced the incidence of spousal violence for girls. Furthermore, since mother’s educational attainment impacts maternal and child health, investing in educating girls is vitally important for breaking the intergenerational cycle of disadvantage.

In both Indian states, many girls dropped out of school due to their families being unable to afford the cost of education. Unsurprisingly, girls in Bihar who received government scholarships were much more likely to complete secondary school. Secondary education can be a transformative force for entire societies and is a key marker for many desirable development outcomes for adolescent girls. Ensuring that girls complete secondary school through cash transfers or scholarships to stave off dropouts is a strategy that’s known to work in other lower-middle-income country contexts, too. These have knock-on effects on child marriage and (desired) fertility.

Improving Learning Outcomes

However, access to schools is only part of the picture. The evidence on learning outcomes bears out that even though in school, girls are not necessarily learning. The importance of improving foundational learning outcomes in schools, as promised in the recently released National Education Policy cannot be overemphasized. This can be achieved through a wider adoption of proven pedagogical approaches such as teaching at the right level, helping teachers adapt curricula to students’ different learning levels.

Exposure To Digital Media

Exposure to digital media helped girls develop gender egalitarian attitudes. However, there is a significant digital divide with far fewer girls accessing the new digital media relative to boys. For example, in Bihar, 71 percent of younger boys and 89 percent of older boys reported ever using the internet whereas 32 percent of younger girls and 50 percent of older girls did. Married girls were the least digitally connected.

Family And Community Support

Role models and parental engagement seem to help build agency in unmarried girls. Parent-child communication regarding sexual and reproductive health is important. In addition, interactions with frontline health workers seemed to benefit married adolescent girls on multiple counts, including substantial increases in mobility and decision-making ability.

Sex Education

Frontline health workers typically make their first contact with a girl or young woman only after she first conceives. This represents a missed opportunity for the health system as it is too late. The health and school systems need to seize on the opportunity to reach out to girls and young women proximate to marriage and their families to help shift norms around early fertility and pre-empt the downstream health and nutrition effects of early marriage and childbearing. Expanding the outreach of trained frontline health workers to young girls and providing comprehensive sexuality education in schools could realize gains an order of magnitude higher than the investments.

Gender Egalitarian Attitudes

Shaping gender-egalitarian attitudes is crucial for manifesting healthy and successful transitions to adulthood for girls. Programs should integrate gender-transformative approaches to help change social norms to support girls’ autonomy in sexual and reproductive health matters. Compared with girls who expressed gender-inequitable views, those who expressed gender-egalitarian attitudes were 20 percent less likely to experience spousal violence and 46 percent more likely to report contraceptive use in Uttar Pradesh. In Bihar, the girls who expressed egalitarian attitudes were 25 percent less likely to report marital violence, 11 percent more likely to report current use of modern contraceptive methods, and 58 percent more likely to delay marriage until the age of 18 years, compared to girls who expressed gender-inequitable attitudes. Gender-egalitarian attitudes also positively impacted girls’ school continuation and transition to paid work.

Essential Investments

A “whole of society” approach with 360-degree engagement at individual, familial, community, and institutional levels is needed to deliver on the promise of gender equity and ensure that adolescent girls achieve their full potential. Importantly, India recently celebrated National Girl Child Day. However, with the pandemic making it more difficult to access health services, teen pregnancies are projected to increase across the world, including in India. The incidence of child marriage has likely increased due to the economic distress caused by the pandemic.

Governments at both the central and state levels must double down on their commitments to ensure that the extant inequities are not exacerbated. Furthermore, the global development community must join forces and deploy its multidisciplinary expertise, including in child protection, education, health, nutrition, and labor force participation to help girls successfully navigate adulthood transitions. To ensure that girls blossom into healthy young women who have choice and agency, the governments must guarantee that girls are in school and learning by investing in scholarships and programmes that aid girls’ mobility, as well as schools with adequate infrastructure, notably separate toilets for girls. They must also adapt health systems to cater to the specific needs of girls and prepare and support them to realise their aspirations for skilled economic activity.

Investing in girls has intergenerational, familial, and community spillover effects. If humanity is to progress, we can’t leave half of it behind—especially not its younger, more vulnerable half.

Author’s Note

The author acknowledges the contributions of the UDAYA study team for conducting analyses for this piece. The UDAYA study is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.