Depressive symptoms are disproportionately high among women and less educated individuals. One mechanism proposed to explain this is the differential vulnerability hypothesis—that these groups experience particularly strong increases in symptoms in response to stressful life events. We identify limitations to prior work and present evidence from a new approach to life stress research using the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Preliminarily, we replicate prior findings of differential vulnerability in between-individual models. Harnessing repeated measures, however, we show that apparent findings of differential vulnerability by both sex and education are artifacts of confounding. Men and women experience similar average increases in depressive symptoms after stressful life events. One exception is tentative evidence for a stronger association among women for events occurring to others in the household. We term this the “female vulnerability to network events” hypothesis and discuss with reference to Kessler and McLeod’s related “cost of caring” hypothesis.

女性和受教育程度较低的人的抑郁症状尤为严重。提出解释这一现象的一种机制是差异脆弱性假说，即这些群体在应对生活压力事件时症状特别强烈地增加。我们确定了先前工作的局限性，并使用英国家庭纵向研究提供了生活压力研究新方法的证据。初步，我们在个体模型中复制了先前关于差异脆弱性的发现。然而，通过重复测量，我们发现性别和教育程度不同的脆弱性的明显发现是混杂的产物。在生活压力事件发生后，男性和女性的抑郁症状平均增加程度相似。一个例外是初步证据表明，女性与家庭中其他人发生的事件有更强的关联。我们将其称为“女性对网络事件的脆弱性”假设，并参考凯斯勒和麦克劳德的相关“护理成本”假设进行讨论。