Incongruent Expectations: A Qualitative Study of the Gendered Experiences of Canadian Young People
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the early mental health of girls and boys is similar, as children age, girls tend to report worse mental health than boys. Explanations for these gendered disparities remain elusive. This study seeks to understand the social context in which mental health experiences are shaped. Utilizing a qualitative, constructivist approach to grounded theory, we conducted virtual semi-structured interviews with young people between ages 11 and 17 years ( n = 20). Our major finding was that girls in particular experience incongruence between expectations about gender equality and everyday experiences of stereotypes, barriers, and discrimination. Girls reported pressures to satisfy multiple gender norms, such as traditional ideals about being feminine (kind and physically attractive) and modern ideas about being high achieving and “smarter than boys.” Findings suggest that young people are unequipped to navigate the incongruence between the expectation that they live in a gender-equal world and their experiences of gender-based constraints, nor do they appear to have the skills to critically identify the structural patterns that undergird their experiences. Explanations for gendered disparities in mental health may be related to the underlying context of discrimination, and both traditional and emerging gendered norms, barriers, and constraints. Finally, we highlight the responsibility of adults to facilitate child development in ways that are responsive to the changing faces of gender discrimination, which readily adapts to social discourse in new and subtle ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".