aBOUT
BRIDGING DIVIDES
There is a gender gap in mental health among young people in London and Tokyo.
We are trying to understand
how and why.
interdisciplinary
We bring together social scientists, biologists, and young people to understand the causes of the gender mental health gap. We want to understand how and why sexism, misogyny and gender inequality (SMGI) may lead to anxiety and depression in young people. We will do it by exploring how SMGI interact with challenges during puberty and how they affect youth mental health.
international
Bridging Divides is funded by the Wellcome Trust and is led in partnership across King’s College London, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, University College London, the McPin Foundation, and the Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim. Our team also includes young people from the UK and Japan.
Intersectional
Our project is with young people, not just about young people – and that’s really important to us. We work with young people at every step, including those with lived experience of mental health struggles. This makes our research better, more relevant, and respectful. We use an intersectional lens, this means we look at how things in life overlap and combine: like sexism, gender inequality, along with culture, race, class, and how the society is constructed. We want to understand how all of these together can shape young people’s mental health.
AREAS OF RESEARCH
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Youth-led research is the foundation of the Bridging Divides project. The project team is a unified group of dedicated young leaders and co-researchers from both London and Tokyo, who bring their invaluable lived experiences directly into the academic process. These dynamic teams work in equal partnership with researchers, driving the project from initial ideas to final dissemination. Their contributions are central to everything we do, whether they are overseeing youth involvement, mentoring new co-researchers, or ensuring the studies genuinely reflect the voices of today’s youth. By collaborating closely, they exchange insights on cultural nuances and shared generational experiences, making our cross-national surveys meaningful, relevant, and truly comparable.
We will also carry out workshops throughout the project with young people (and the adults who work with them) at our partner schools and youth advocacy & support organisations, to ensure as wide a range of voices are included as possible in the research design and interpretation of findings.
ALL WITH YOUTH INVOLVEMENT!
FIND OUT MORE…
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Young people's experiences with sexism and mental health can vary in different parts of the world. This project takes place across two sites, London and Tokyo.
We already know that emotional health trajectories are around four times worse amongst teenage girls in London than in Tokyo, and by the age of 16 the gender mental health gap is around twice as large in London. Different risk factors (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic, the acceptance or rejection of gender norms) affect boys and girls differently in each country. By carrying out this research in both the UK and Japan, we can gain richer insights that one country alone may not provide.
This part of the project builds on an earlier phase, where we ran school workshops in schools, in both London and Tokyo. We gathered young people’s thoughts and opinions on the underlying causes of the gender mental health gap, on what sexism means to them and the different ways in which they experience it.