Men who fail to match or exceed their parents’ educational achievements suffer levels of psychological distress similar to the impact of divorce, while women are largely unaffected, according to new research.

Researchers at the University of Oxford analysed data from more than 50,000 people across the UK and 27 other mainly European countries to compare their psychological states with their educational achievements.

They found that for men, exceeding their parents’ educational achievements have a positive effect resulting in reduced psychological distress, while falling short appears to have a damaging effect on men’s wellbeing with an increase in psychological distress.

The research, launched on Tuesday at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference at Northumbria University, contradicts earlier studies that found improving on parental academic achievements appeared to have little positive impact on psychological state.

The study found that the consequences of doing better or worse than their parents were “observed primarily among men rather than among women”. The authors said: “Our results suggest that the role of social origins, net of intergenerational mobility, is much more significant for men than for women. This corroborates some earlier evidence that men’s life chances are more related to their social origins than life chances of women.”

The team of three researchers at Oxford’s department of social policy and intervention and Nuffield College divided educational attainment into three categories: in the UK, top was degree level, A-levels middle, while bottom was GCSEs or lower. They compared this with an overall score for psychological distress.



They found that men whose educational achievements were in the bottom level, and whose parents were in the top, were more than twice as likely to be among the top 10% most psychologically distressed group of individuals than those whose educational level matched their parents’.

The psychological effect of this gap in attainment is comparable with the gap between those who were divorced and those who were not, according to the researchers, or the gap between those in an ethnic minority group with the ethnic majority.

The paper, titled Intergenerational Education Mobility and Psychological Distress in Europe, found that men with middling educational achievement whose parents were top achievers were 75% more likely to be psychologically distressed than those whose level was the same as their parents.

Men whose educational level was at the top and whose parents’ were at the bottom level were 50% less likely to be psychologically distressed than men whose level was the same as their parents.

Alexi Gugushvili, a co-author of the report, said: “Getting a higher educational achievement than one’s parents is associated with a reduced level of psychological distress, even after the direct effect of individuals’ and their parents’ education and other conventional explanations of distress are accounted for.

“On the contrary, falling short of one’s parents’ education tends to raise the distress level, and a big disparity is especially harmful for men’s psychological health status.

“For men, parents’ educational achievement and intergenerational mobility retain an important influence on their psychological health after accounting for individuals’ social class and other explanations of distress, but no effect is observed for women’s distress.

“The reason for this could be that men are more likely than women to attribute success and failure by pointing to their own merits, abilities and effort, rather than factors they have no control over.”

Gugushvili and his fellow co-authors, Yizhang Zhao and Erzsébet Bukodi, analysed data from the 2012-14 European Social Survey, which was conducted among 52,773 people aged 25-65 across 27 European countries and Israel.