Half of all mental health problems start by the age of 15 and the teenage and young adult years are particularly difficult for girls with high and increasing rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm. Many different factors contribute, including social media, peer pressures, focus on appearance, friends, relationships, schoolwork and, as Everyone’s Invited has recently highlighted, personal safety. There is tremendous pressure to conform with the expectations of others. Attitudes to women and girls seem to have gone into reverse during the author’s lifetime. It is too simplistic to view the problems of young women as a simply a ‘lack of self-esteem’. The difficulties they face in society are consistently underestimated and not taken seriously. Fast access to therapy is crucial. Bullying must be addressed effectively. Sexist and mysogynistic attitudes in school must be challenged and, given the easy access now to pornography, the issues of consent should addressed head on by both parents and schools. Using the example of Everyone’s Invited, women and girls need to reach out and support each other. The personal is still political.

The well-established concept of expressive voting concludes that the public policy preferences people express are likely to differ from their instrumental preferences, but the literature on expressive voting has not developed clear conclusions about how people form their expressive preferences. An extensive literature on preference formation helps to answer this question. Because there are no instrumental consequences from the political preferences citizens hold, the utility they get from those preferences comes solely from their having and expressing them. People have a status quo bias, and are prone to value the preferences they have because of the endowment effect. People adopt preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance, and often yield to peer pressure when choosing the public policy preferences they express. There is a bandwagon effect, and people’s policy preferences are affected by the mass media. This chapter goes beyond just saying that expressive preferences differ from instrumental preferences by explaining why they differ.