Teenage girls, according to a new survey, are more miserable than teenage boys. More In Common polled over 1,000 16- and 17-year-olds, and revealed that more than half of both sexes reported suffering some kind of mental health condition. But there’s a marked sex difference: 34% of girls report suffering from anxiety, compared to 14% of boys.

Why, then, are girls so much more unhappy than boys? The short answer: I’m not sure they are.

It should surprise no one if today’s adolescents feel under pressure. Born roughly concurrently with the global financial crash, this group has never known a Britain that wasn’t roiled by one crisis or another. Where their parents would have reached adolescence amid the widespread optimism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, theirs happened among the divisive Brexit referendum and, shortly thereafter, the Covid pandemic.

And this in particular was uniformly catastrophic for children. Those now aged 16 and 17 were locked down right at the formative moment of beginning secondary school, a transition that represents a socially and psychologically significant caesura in the lives of almost every child growing up in Britain. Now, imagine that this momentous change arrives — but you spend the usually socially formative first year sitting at home doomscrolling. No wonder some are not bouncing back: Government figures published earlier this year indicated that the number of young people receiving Personal Independence Payment (PIP) — the main welfare benefit issued for disability — has skyrocketed since the pandemic from 2,967 to 7,857 a month, with much of this increase due to reported mental health conditions.

So when More in Common show girls self-reporting much higher levels of mental illness than boys, you might expect this to show up in statistics on welfare claims in this age group. But when I looked at current Government figures on PIP claims since 2019, I found that the opposite is true. While the overall figures do skew female, this only holds in older age brackets. Among young people, the sex disparity runs the other way, with 116,000 claims among boys aged 16-19 and 78,000 for girls in the same age bracket.

These figures don’t specify the nature of the claim, but the marked difference in numbers suggests a gap between what’s reported to pollsters, and what’s experienced acutely enough to prompt a welfare application. So what gives? One hypothesis is that unhappiness is prevalent across both sexes, but shows up differently between them. This would be consistent with extant psychological research, which suggests boys are more likely to “externalize” unhappiness via confrontational, disruptive, or risk-taking behavior, while girls are more likely to “internalize” their distress. For girls this often means anxiety and depression, conditions linked to the “Big Five” traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism where psychological research also shows women generally score more highly than men.

So, even leaving aside extraordinary experiences such as lockdown, you’d expect unhappiness to show up differently in polls depending on sex. But it doesn’t follow from this that boys aren’t suffering. The teenager who told More In Common about social difficulties after lockdown was a boy. Jake, 17, said: “When we went back [to school], I felt very out of place … I struggled a lot with social interaction.” And if girls are reporting high anxiety, a teenage girl quoted recently by columnist Caitlin Moran points to one way in which the unhappy boys may be externalizing: by tormenting the girls. The girl asked Moran pointedly: “Who do you think they’re taking out their unhappiness on? It’s us.”

Nothing is ever monocausal. The poll also points to pornography and phone overuse as factors. But taken all together, Government PIP figures plus this new poll all point to the way an existing negative trend in youth mental health has been exacerbated by the disastrous psychological impact of lockdowns. And while it’s easy to take self-reports at face value, and focus concern on girls, reading the figures sideways suggests this would be an error. Really, distress is equally distributed, but the sexes’ divergent responses to this distress are amplifying one another, in unhappily asymmetrical ways.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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