Title Pending 6781

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Religiosity and mental health are all phenomena firmly embedded in sociocultural fabric of a society and affect one another. This study has aimed to determine the effect of gender on positive mental health, psychological distress and level of religiosity among university students across Pakistan. A convenience sample of 554 respondents (males = 196, females = 307; age range 18-30 with 61.4% in the 18-23 bracket) from all the provinces of country completed an online questionnaire after giving informed consent. We utilized the Flourishing Scale-SF, Multidimensional Measure of Islamic Spirituality, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Assessment (GAD-7) and Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). Findings demonstrate gender-based differences in level of religiosity. Slight gender differences were also found in depression but there were no differences in level of anxiety across genders. Males showed higher scores on mental health continuum. Future studies can be administered on general population with large sample for better understanding of gender dynamics in society.