Working with young people to transform understanding of how sex and sexism cause anxiety in teenage girls and young women: international, interdisciplinary & intersectional approaches.

Our team includes social scientists, neurobiologists, and young people from the UK and Japan. Our vision is a world in which girls/women are no longer three times more likely than boys/men to experience debilitating anxiety and depression. Realising this vision requires transformative change in understanding of the multilevel mechanisms through which biological sex and sexism cause anxiety and depression to develop and persist. We will co-produce with young people three work packages (WP) to uncover causal mechanisms, including the role of brain (structure), body (periods, hormones), society (e.g., sexual harassment, unequal expectations), and their interplay. We will do this work in two sites (UK, Japan) because girls’ emotional health trajectories vary, and comparing could help us understand why. We will: (WP1) interview girls (10-16-years) and young women (17-24-years) to understand how sexism and bodily changes are experienced, and co-design ways to measure these; (WP2) enhance and analyse data from existing youth cohort and population-neuroscience studies; (WP3) use innovative approaches (wearables, hormone-profiling, period-tracking, experience sampling) to understand temporal unfolding of mechanisms in real-time. WP2 and WP3 use methods allowing for causal inference. We will generate groundbreaking interdisciplinary insights required to transform responses to high and rising rates of anxiety/depression in girls/women.