Women are getting angrier, according to a BBC analysis of 10 years of data from the Gallup World Poll.

When it comes to negative feelings in particular - anger, sadness, stress and worry - women consistently report feeling these more frequently than men.

The BBC's analysis has found that since 2012 more women than men report feeling sadness and worry, though both genders have been steadily trending upwards.

When it comes to anger and stress however, the gap with men is widening. In 2012 both genders reported anger and stress at similar levels. Nine years later women are angrier - by a margin of six percentage points - and more stressed too. And there was a particular divergence around the time of the pandemic.

Sarah Harmon, a therapist in the US, in the early 2021 got a group of female clients together to stand in a field and scream.

A year later she took to the field again. "That was the scream that went viral," she says. It was picked up by a journalist in one of her online mum's groups and suddenly reporters were calling from all over the world.

Sarah believes she tapped into something that women everywhere were feeling, an intense frustration that the burden of the pandemic was falling disproportionately on them.

A 2020 survey of almost 5,000 parents in heterosexual relationships in England, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, found that mothers took on more of the domestic responsibilities during lockdown than fathers. As a result, they reduced their working hours. This was the case even when they were the higher earner in the family.

In some countries the difference in the number of women and men who say they felt anger the previous day is much higher than the global average.

In Cambodia, the gap was 17 percentage points in 2021 while in India and Pakistan it was 12.

Psychiatrist Dr Lakshmi Vijayakumar believes this is the result of tensions that have emerged as more women in these countries have become educated, employed and economically independent.

"At the same time, they are tethered down by archaic, patriarchal systems and culture," she says. "The dissonance between a patriarchal system at home and an emancipated woman outside of home causes a lot of anger."

Every Friday evening at rush hour in Chennai in India, she witnesses this dynamic in action.

The pandemic's effect on women's work may also be having an impact. Before 2020 there was slow progress on women's participation in the workforce, according to Ginette Azcona, a data scientist at UN Women. But in 2020 it stalled. This year the number of women in work is projected to be below 2019 levels in 169 countries.

Many more women than men said they were stressed in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Cyprus and Greece. In Brazil almost six in 10 women said they had felt stressed for much of the previous day, compared with just under four in 10 men.
-BBC