A prominent debate in modern society is how males or females are faring relative to each other. Despite a vast literature, most research is constrained by two issues: a limited conceptualization and assessment of what it means to do well; and a relatively narrow, often Western-centric coverage. To address these issues, this paper examines male-female differences on 73 items relating to all aspects of wellbeing in the Global Flourishing Study, with data from 202,898 participants across 22 countries. When organizing the items into six domains according to VanderWeele’s flourishing framework, females do slightly better on three (happiness and satisfaction, social relationship quality, and meaning and purpose), and males on two (self-rated health, and financial and material security), and with character/virtue equal. While all domains are weighted equally, since females are only marginally higher on three, whereas the gaps on the two male-led ones are much bigger, males fare slightly better on an overall flourishing index. There is also considerable country-level variation throughout the findings however, showing these general trends are not universal but contingent on local socio-cultural dynamics.
Lomas et al. (2026) studied this question.