Performance of Femininity as the Potential Determinant of Lower Well-Being Among Adolescent Girls in London, UK: An Exploratory Discourse Analysis

In the UK, girls are consistently found to have lower subjective well-being and higher rates of anxiety disorders/depression compared to boys. While the reasons for these gender disparities are complex, how girls conceptualize, experience, and “perform” femininity may be one pathway which exacerbates psychological stress. To explore this hypothesis, we conducted an in-depth exploratory study to examine how norms and experiences of femininity among seven adolescent girls aged 16–17 from London, England (external factors), relate to their behaviors and psychological experiences (internal factors). To do so, we conducted two online focus groups in July 2021, and conducted discourse analysis to explore their conceptualizations of femininity and its impact on participants. We identified two key discourses relating to the concepts and experiences around femininity among these girls: “Valued by Conformity to Femininity,” or how girls are judged by others based on their presentation and performance of femininity, and “An Uncertain Perception of Self,” relating to uncertain self-identity stemming from their performance of femininity. We reveal a potential social conditioning process of “performing femininity” experienced by our participants, leading to hypervigilance, anxiety, uncertainty, and confusion. Our results suggest that the paradoxical and conflicting expectations around femininity, reinforced by others, may cause cognitive distortions and dissonance, increasing vulnerabilities to low well-being and anxious cognition patterns. Thus, we believe that there are grounds for further research on a larger scale which explores whether there is a sociological mechanism which is creating the gender gap in mental health outcomes at adolescence in the UK.