ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Cross-Cultural Examination of Intrasexual Competition: The Links Between Mating Competition, Aggression, Appearance Enhancement, and Sexuality.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Intrasexual Competition and Rival Derogation in Women Are Associated With Visual Processing of Emotional Facial Expressions.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Income and Sex Moderate the Association Between Population Density and Reproduction: A Multilevel Analysis of Life History Strategies Across 23 Nations.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- High economic inequality is linked to greater moralization.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Young people on social media in a globalized world: self-optimization in highly competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Perceptions of Income Inequality and Women's Intrasexual Competition.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Men. Male-biased sex ratios and masculinity norms: evidence from Australia's colonial past.Journal of economic growth (Boston, Mass.) · 2023Article
- Married women with children experience greater intrasexual competition than their male counterparts.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Direct and Indirect Roles of Men in Determining Women Decision to Use Laser Procedures for Skin Care.Clinical, cosmetic and investigational dermatology · 2023Review
- Workplace inequality is associated with status-signaling expenditure.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- No Gender Differences in Enrollment for Replicated, Minimally-Different 'Pornographic' Versus 'Photographic' Studies.International journal of sexual health : official journal of the World Association for Sexual Health · 2022Article
- Dense is not green: How visual density influences greenness evaluation on environmentally friendly products.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Beyond social learning.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Gender inequality and gender-based poverty in Mexico.Heliyon · 2020Article
- In the context of romantic attraction, beautification can increase assertiveness in women.PloS one · 2020Article
- Status anxiety mediates the positive relationship between income inequality and sexualization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2019Article
- Economic inequality drives female sexualization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Sex Differences in Perception of Economic and Dating Access.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Publicly displayed, sexualized depictions of women have proliferated, enabled by new communication technologies, including the internet and mobile devices. These depictions are often claimed to be outcomes of a culture of gender inequality and female oppression, but, paradoxically, recent rises in sexualization are most notable in societies that have made strong progress toward gender parity. Few empirical tests of the relation between gender inequality and sexualization exist, and there are even fewer tests of alternative hypotheses. We examined aggregate patterns in 68,562 sexualized self-portrait photographs ("sexy selfies") shared publicly on Twitter and Instagram and their association with city-, county-, and cross-national indicators of gender inequality. We then investigated the association between sexy-selfie prevalence and income inequality, positing that sexualization-a marker of high female competition-is greater in environments in which incomes are unequal and people are preoccupied with relative social standing. Among 5,567 US cities and 1,622 US counties, areas with relatively more sexy selfies were more economically unequal but not more gender oppressive. A complementary pattern emerged cross-nationally (113 nations): Income inequality positively covaried with sexy-selfie prevalence, particularly within more developed nations. To externally validate our findings, we investigated and confirmed that economically unequal (but not gender-oppressive) areas in the United States also had greater aggregate sales in goods and services related to female physical appearance enhancement (beauty salons and women's clothing). Here, we provide an empirical understanding of what female sexualization reflects in societies and why it proliferates.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.