Are Gender Differences an Artifact?
It has been suggested that apparent gender differences in the rate of depression are the result of one or more possible artifacts. In particular, it has been suggested that perceived differences in rate are the result of the use of assessments of depression that do not draw a distinction between clinical depression and subclinical symptoms. Typically, such approaches count the number of symptoms that each respondent reports and then average the number of symptoms across a population. This average score might be higher among women because they are more likely to report subclinical symptoms (Newmann, 1984, as cited in Nazroo et al., 1998). We examined this theory by exploring whether any detected gender difference in depression was sensitive to a raising of the threshold for diagnosing depression. Contrary to the hypothesis, we found that, if anything, the size of the gender difference in depression increased, rather than decreased, as the threshold was increased (Nazroo et al., 1997, 19
