Females’ mental ill health: Psychological fallout of gender disparity

Pages: 410-414
Anita Sharma (Department of Psychology, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla)

The current study explored the effects of gender discrimination (GD) on female’s mental health. The main question of the present enquiry was to see why is females’ mental health inferior to that of males? This study hypothesized that female’s mental health is not as good as male’s because females perceive more personal discrimination. Results confirmed that females scored significantly higher to that of males on a subjective scale of psychological distress. In addition to it, females perceived greater personal and group discrimination than did males. Perceived personal discrimination proved to be the strongest predictor of psychological distress. This was evident when results of a mediation analysis revealed that gender differences in subjective distress were mediated by the measure of perceived personal discrimination, but not by the measure of group discrimination. The rationale for results have been given in the discussion section.