The Girls Are Not Alright 

What young women’s mental health can tell us about the global societies we have built 

Around the world, mental health is a major part of growing up. The World Health Organization estimates that one in seven 10–19-year-olds experiences a mental health condition, with depression and anxiety among the leading causes of illness and disability in adolescence. But the burden is not evenly distributed. 

According to the latest Global Burden of Disease estimates, in 2023 an estimated 5.65% of girls aged 15–19 worldwide were living with depressive disorders, compared with 3.81% of boys. That means the prevalence among girls was almost one and a half times that among boys. 

Behind these numbers is a question that statistics alone cannot answer: Why? 

There is no single culprit. It would be comforting if there were. We could blame social media. Or academic pressure. Or body image. Relationships. Family circumstances. Economic insecurity. But the truth is that a young woman does not experience these pressures separately. They can accumulate and interact. 

What are we asking women to adapt to? 

This is where the conversation becomes more uncomfortable. When women experience anxiety, depression or low self-esteem, the response is often directed towards the individual. 

Build resilience. Set boundaries. Spend less time online. Improve your self-esteem. Learn to cope with stress. These things can help. But they leave another question largely untouched: 

Why is the individual so often expected to adapt? 

Young women are navigating expectations that can appear contradictory. 

Be ambitious, but not intimidating. Be attractive, but not obsessed with your appearance. Be confident, but not arrogant. Be independent, but still caring. Build a career, while potentially carrying a disproportionate share of unpaid care. Be sexually confident, but avoid being judged for it. Speak up, but not too loudly. 

None of these gendered pressures, individually, can explain why someone becomes depressed. Nor does every woman experience them. But taken together, they raise a bigger question about the society in which young women are growing up. 

Who decided this was normal? 

For centuries, political, economic and social power was disproportionately held by men, while women were excluded from many of the institutions that shaped their lives. As shown by the Equal Measures’ SDG Gender Index, much has changed. Women have gained rights, access to education, political representation and economic opportunities that previous generations were denied. But behind every wave of progress, lies a quieter, more complacent part of society that does not question whether this progress is good enough. Expectations persist. Institutions can retain assumptions. Cultural norms can become so familiar that we stop noticing them. 

We tend to ask: Why are young women struggling? 

Perhaps we should also ask: What if the roles were truly reversed for a day? 

Imagine men were banned from secondary or higher education: as women and girls are under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. 

Imagine men were subjected to widespread sexual violence during armed conflict: as women and girls are in Sudan.  

Imagine men could become pregnant as a result of rape, yet were denied access to abortion: as is currently the case for rape survivors in nine US states with total abortion bans and no rape exception. 

Would we simply tell them to become more resilient? Would we tell them to spend less time online? Would we simply accept these outcomes as an unfortunate consequence of growing up? 

Or would we ask a more fundamental question: What kind of world are we subjecting them to?  

This is not to suggest that men do not experience gendered pressures. They do. Nor is mental health a competition between men and women. The point is that when a consistent difference in outcomes appears between groups, we should feel obliged to investigate the environments producing that difference. 

We cannot solve the problem simply by telling girls to put down their phones. Nor can healthcare systems, schools, families or governments solve it independently. But we can stop treating unequal outcomes as inevitable. 

We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. We can measure inequalities that previous generations could not see. We can identify disparities between women and men and investigate the social conditions surrounding them. 

We know more. Perhaps now, the most important question raised by the numbers is no longer simply: 

Why are the girls not alright?  

It is: Why, in a society that knows better, are we still allowing it to continue?