In one study, newborns were dressed in gender-neutral clothing and researchers misled adults about their sex. Parents were far more likely to describe the babies they thought were boys as upset or angry than the girls, who they categorized instead as nice and happy.

Boys ar...

Adaptable girls find socially acceptable ways to internalize or channel their anger, often at great personal cost. Examples of this include:

• Passive aggressive behavior
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Apathy
• Meanness
• Lying

These unspoken gender rules result in girls losing awareness of their own anger.

Their anger builds up, but they don't have a healthy way of letting it out, so instead they do things like:

• Cry for apparently no reason
• Laugh inappropriatel...

Internalizing anger is just as harmful as violent outbursts, if not even more so.

Between the ages of 12 and 15, the number of girls who have depression triples, a rate three times that of same-age boys. Feelings of powerlessness and anger are also integral to the development of eat...

Women and men react differently to experiencing anger. For men, anger reinforces traditional gender expectations, for women it confounds them. That conflict by itself is a source of anxiety.

Girls are more likely to learn that their feelings of anger, no ma...

There are many reasons why teenage girls specifically start feeling angry and powerless:

1. They learn about the real impact of gender-based double standards.
2. They also become aware of physical vulnerability, and experience sexual harassment for t...

Girls should be told explicitly that it’s alright to feel anger. That it’s a healthy emotion that, as humans, they have the right to feel and express. It might not make them any friends, but that’s another topic entirely.

It also doesn’t mean giving children, girls or boys,...

Studies show that when men are angry, people tend to lose their own confidence and defer to men’s opinions. When women are angry, the opposite happens.

Studies also reveal that people will opt to work for angry-sounding aggr...

Women's anger is often treated as irrational and unnecessary. Men's anger, on the other hand, usually seems righteous and justified.

Where does this disparity come from and what effects does it have?