You can read this newsletter online at this link: https://lesglorieuses.fr/who-gets-to-flourish

What does it mean to “flourish” in life? This is a question that has occupied philosophers, prophets, poets and more for millenia, and the answers have been as varied as those seeking them.

Now, an enormous survey of over 200,000 people from 22 countries has tried to quantify the phenomenon. The Global Flourishing Study asked participants to answer a 109-item questionnaire about their lives — including whether they feel a sense of purpose, how healthy they feel, and how satisfied they are with their friendships. It’s a goldmine of potential stories and questions.

In this newsletter, I’m focusing on what the data reveals about the differences between men and women. Where are the similarities? Where are the
differences? Who is flourishing more — and what does flourishing actually mean?

The headline finding is that men and women around the world report similar levels of flourishing, although they often get there by different paths. When averaged across all 22 countries, men  scored 7.19 out of 10, and women scored 7.12.

There is a stark and important exception. People who identified their gender as “other” reported significantly lower levels of wellbeing across nearly every measure, with an average score of 6.12. This disparity raises serious concerns about the wellbeing of gender-diverse people globally. (It’s important to note that the Global Flourishing Study was not designed to produce reliable estimates for this group: in many countries, sample sizes were extremely small or nonexistent, and in-person interviews often relied on interviewer assumptions rather than self-identification. According to the researchers themselves, the data does not support firm conclusions.)

But what does it mean to “flourish”? How do the different elements of wellbeing vary between genders? And how were the final scores composed?

What it means to flourish

Participants were asked questions relating to six areas of what it means to live a good life:

1. Happiness and life satisfaction. How happy people feel and how satisfied they are with their lives overall.
2. Mental and physical health. How healthy people feel, both in terms of physical health and mental wellbeing, including feelings of depression or anxiety.
3. Meaning and purpose. Whether people feel their lives have direction, meaning, or a sense of purpose.
4. Character and virtue. How people feel about their capacity for forgiveness, love, gratitude, and striving to do good.
5. Close social relationships. Satisfaction with relationships with family and friends.
6. Financial and material stability. Whether people feel secure about their basic needs: food, shelter, and safety.

Once you break down the results by domain, interesting trends start to appear. For an overview of the data, I spoke to Timothy Lomas, who is the lead author of a yet-to-be-published-analysis of what the survey reveals about “male versus female flourishing”.

He explained that women
tend to do slightly better than men in three categories: happiness and satisfaction; social relationship quality; and meaning and purpose. Men tend to do better in self-rated health and financial and material security. 

Men did better on physical and mental health in 18 countries, whereas women did better in four: Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, and the Philippines. For financial and material security, men did better in 20 of 22 countries, with women doing better only in Japan and Nigeria. 

The countries with the largest gender gaps in reported wellbeing are Brazil and Japan. In Japan, women report flourishing
significantly more than men. In Brazil, the opposite is true. So what might explain the striking gender differences in Brazil and Japan? 

I spoke to researchers based in each country to try to understand the roots of these differences – are they due to cultural norms, psychological factors, economic inequality, or something else?

Women in Brazil report lower wellbeing than men – why?
Photo: Victor Freitas

Japan

Yukiko Uchida, Director, Institute for the Future of Human Society, Kyoto University

In general, studies on subjective well-being in Japan (e.g. happiness and life satisfaction) have found that women tend to score slightly higher than men. This reflects a paradox often observed in Japan: despite reporting higher levels of psychological distress due to gender inequality, women also report equal or greater levels of positive well-being than men.

One possible explanation is that the determinants of well-being may differ by gender. Men’s happiness appears to be more strongly tied to socioeconomic status, whereas women’s happiness is more closely linked to social relationships. This resonates with Japan’s interdependent cultural context, where well-being is often rooted in harmonious social connections and sensitivity to context rather than individual achievement.

One emerging trend that I believe researchers and journalists might pay more attention to is the generational shift in gender and well-being. Among younger generations in Japan – those in their 20s and 30s – we see a narrowing gender gap, including more egalitarian relationships within marriage. In
contrast, older generations (especially those in their 60s and above) continue to embody more traditional gender roles.

At the same time, there is growing recognition that men, particularly younger and middle-aged men, are facing their own well-being challenges. Some studies suggest that men in their 30s and 40s may report lower well-being due to work-related pressures, changing gender expectations and concerns about their identity. I think it might be important to move beyond binary gender comparisons and examine how gender and age intersect to shape well-being.

Brazil

Ligia Carolina Oliveira-Silva, Professor in Social, Work & Organizational Psychology, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia

The gender gap in flourishing reported in Brazil is rooted in a constellation of structural and intersectional factors that disproportionately affect women’s mental health. A central issue is the unequal burden of unpaid care work and domestic responsibilities, which continues to fall predominantly on women – especially mothers – due to enduring cultural expectations rooted in machismo and the valorisation of female sacrifice and maternal devotion.

This restricts their participation in the labor market and reduces time for self-care, education, or leisure – dimensions that are central to the dominant, yet narrow, Global North concept of “flourishing.” Gendered labor market inequalities further exacerbate these disparities: women in Brazil experience higher unemployment rates, wage gaps, and overrepresentation in informal and precarious work, particularly in domestic services. 

These patterns are not incidental. They reflect colonial continuities and a deeply racialised, class-based division of labor, historically forged through slavery and now reinforced by neoliberal economic models that disregard care work and social reproduction.

Moreover, Brazilian women live in a
context of high gender-based violence – Brazil ranks among the countries with the highest rates of femicide globally.

Such realities particularly affect Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA+ women, whose lives are marked by fear, stigma, and state abandonment.

Institutional and cultural norms within Brazilian organizations also play a powerful role in reinforcing inequality. Many still operate under Eurocentric managerial logics and colonial hierarchies that privilege whiteness, masculinity, and heteronormativity. These models, largely shaped in and by the Global North, fail to account for collective, community-based, and culturally situated understandings of wellbeing.

Related to this, I also think we urgently need to
rethink flourishing from a decolonial standpoint. The women I’ve spoken to in Brazil do not seek flourishing through individual accumulation or productivity but through interdependence, cultural survival, and dignified life on their own terms. So addressing the gender gap in flourishing in Brazil will demand comprehensive social, economic, and policy transformations.

Research Round-up

Here’s what else is making the news:

1. ⛑️ 90% of women’s organisations helping women in crises are facing funding difficulties due to global aid cuts, and half may shut down in six months due to global
   aid cuts.
2. 🇿🇦 A study tracking millions of workers shows that nearly half the gender pay gap in South Africa is explained by women working at lower-paying companies than men.
3. 🇬🇧 The first UK-wide gender equality index reveals that no local authority has achieved parity.

About The Evidence

The Evidence is a supplement to the Impact newsletter designed to help you understand gender inequality – and show how we might fix it. Impact is a weekly newsletter of feminist journalism, dedicated to the rights of women and gender-diverse people worldwide.

This is the English version of our newsletter; you can read the French one here.