Gender differences in competitiveness and fear of failure help explain why girls have lower life satisfaction than boys in gender equal countries

Gender differences in competitiveness and fear of failure help explain why girls have lower life satisfaction than boys in gender equal countries. Kimmo Eriksson and Pontus Strimling. Front. Psychol., March 9 2023, Volume 14 - 2023. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1131837

Abstract: Among 15-year-olds, boys tend to report higher life satisfaction than girls. Recent research has shown that this gender gap tends to be larger in more gender-egalitarian countries. We shed light on this apparent paradox by examining the mediating role of two psychological dispositions: competitiveness and fear of failure. Using data from the 2018 PISA study, we analyze the life satisfaction, competitiveness, and fear of failure of more than 400,000 15-year-old boys and girls in 63 countries with known levels of gender equality. We find that competitiveness and fear of failure together mediate more than 40 percent of the effects on life satisfaction of gender and its interaction with gender equality. Thus, interventions targeting competitiveness and fear of failure could potentially have an impact on the gender gap in life satisfaction among adolescents in gender equal countries.

Discussion

In this paper, we have addressed the gender-equality paradox in adolescent life satisfaction. How can it be that the difference in life satisfaction between adolescent boys and girls is larger in more gender-equal countries? We proposed a novel kind of explanation: that the gender-equality paradox for life satisfaction can be pushed back to similar paradoxes for psychological dispositions that affect life satisfaction. Specifically, we proposed that fear of failure and competitiveness may play this mediating role.

We examined the life satisfaction, fear of failure, and competitiveness of 15-year-olds in 63 countries around the world. Replicating prior findings, we observed a male advantage in all three measures. In other words, boys are more satisfied with their life than girls are (Inchley et al., 2016), boys experience less fear of failure than girls do (Borgonovi and Han, 2021), and boys are more competitive than girls (Boneva et al., 2022). Moreover, in more gender-equal countries, we observe wider gender gaps in life satisfaction (Campbell et al., 2021), fear of failure (Borgonovi and Han, 2021), and competitiveness (Napp and Breda, 2022). Our study appears to be the first to examine these phenomena simultaneously.

We found the correlation between gender gaps and gender equality to be stronger for psychological dispositions (fear of failure and competitiveness) than for life satisfaction. This finding is in keeping with our hypothesis that the pathway by which gender and gender equality affect life satisfaction goes via psychological dispositions (Figure 2). More evidence for this hypothesis was obtained in a mediation analysis, which showed that fear of failure and competitiveness could account for 40 percent of the effects on life satisfaction of gender and its interaction with gender equality.

This work has both theoretical and practical implications. From a theoretical point of view, we have demonstrated a way to connect different instances of the gender-equality paradox. If X and Y are two individual-level variables and X influences Y, then the gender-equality paradox may hold for Y simply because it holds for X. In the case studied in the present research, X were certain dispositions and Y was life satisfaction. The same logic could potentially be used to connect other of the numerous instances of the gender-equality paradox. For example, it could be that the gender-equality paradox in personality (Costa et al., 2001) underlies several other instances of the paradox for variables that are influenced by personality. This is a topic for future research.

From a practical point of view, our findings describe both a problem and a potential solution. The problem is that girls’ life satisfaction is especially low in gender-equal societies. The potential solution is that interventions that target girls’ low competitiveness and high fear of failure in these societies could also be a way of achieving greater life satisfaction. How to conduct such interventions is beyond the scope of this study. The literature on interventions includes studies on both competitiveness (Boneva et al., 2022) and fear of failure (Stamps, 1973; Martin and Marsh, 2003), which may be a starting point.

An important limitation of the current study is that it relies on cross-sectional data, which do not provide information on causal directions. Thus, from the data we cannot exclude the possibility that the causal direction goes in reverse, that is, that young people’s level of life satisfaction may influence their competitiveness and fear of failure. Intervention studies may also provide evidence for our working assumption about the causal direction.

Another limitation is that life satisfaction was measured by a single item. Such measures are sensitive to individual differences in response style. Response style could similarly bias the measure of competitiveness, because although it is measured using several items, they are all coded in the same direction. The same goes for fear of failure. However, it is unlikely that our findings are driven by response style, as competitiveness and lack of fear of failure are coded in different directions yet give similar results.