Masculinity may have a protective effect against the development of depression — even for women

Article here. Excerpt:

'Women and men who strongly endorse masculine traits are less susceptible to depressive symptoms compared to their less masculine counterparts, according to new research published in the Journal of Affective Disorders that examined 40 years of evidence. The findings could help explain why women face a greater risk of depression.

“The idea for this study began in 2007. Since then, our team has published a series of work referring to sex differences in emotional susceptibility and found that women are more sensitive to emotionally negative stimuli than men,” said study author Hong Li, a professor at South China Normal University and director of the Chinese Psychological Society.

“We inferred that this may be an important mechanism for the gender difference in the prevalence of depression, as women are almost twice as likely to suffer from depression as men. Therefore, we asked whether girls/women suffer from high-risk depression just because of their biological sex? We searched for answers from the past literature and found that psycho-social gender (e.g., gender role) might be an effective indicator of predicting depression susceptibility, even more accurate than biological sex, because personal emotions are easily affected by social factors.”'