Economic Inequality Pushes People Toward Traditional Masculinity and Gender Essentialism, Experiments Show

Economic inequality does not merely shape bank balances and voting patterns; it appears to reach deep into the psychology of gender. A new pair of experiments conducted in Spain and Italy suggests that simply exposing people to information about a highly unequal society makes them more accepting of traditional male role norms and more likely to endorse gender essentialism, the belief that differences between men and women are natural, fixed and biologically rooted. The research, published in the journal Current Psychology, was carried out by Sabina de-León-de-León and Rosa Rodríguez-Bailón of the University of Granada, Jesús L. Megías, also of Granada, and Stefano Pagliaro of the University of Chieti-Pescara, and it offers some of the most direct experimental evidence yet that the economic structure of a society can bend everyday beliefs about what men and women are like.

The starting point for the study is a growing body of work showing that inequality is not economically neutral in its psychological effects. Previous research has found that people living in more unequal contexts tend to perceive the social world as more competitive and individualistic, that stereotypes about social classes harden under inequality, and that the traits perceived as dominant or prestigious in unequal settings skew toward the agentic and stereotypically masculine. Building on these findings, the Spanish and Italian team asked a more pointed question: if inequality makes masculine traits seem more valued, does it also strengthen the ideological scaffolding that supports traditional gender arrangements, namely the acceptance of norms about how men should behave and the conviction that gender differences are written into nature?

To answer it, the researchers ran two preregistered experiments with a combined sample of 551 participants, 56.1 percent of whom were women, 39.6 percent men, and 4.4 percent of whom did not identify as either men or women or did not report their gender. Study 1 was conducted in Spain, with data collected between June 5 and July 16, 2023, following preregistration on May 30, 2023. Study 2 took place in Italy, with data collected between October 12 and October 31, 2023, after preregistration on October 11 of that year. In both studies, participants were randomly assigned to read information portraying their society as either economically equal or highly unequal, a manipulation designed to make the salience of inequality the key experimental difference between groups.

After the manipulation, participants completed validated measures of the study’s central constructs. Acceptance of traditional male role norms was assessed with an instrument rooted in the Male Role Norms tradition, capturing endorsement of expectations such as toughness, status-seeking and the restriction of emotional expression in men. Gender essentialism was measured with scales probing the extent to which people view gender categories as discrete, natural and unchangeable. In Study 2, the team added a third outcome: expectations of masculine honour concerns, the degree to which participants anticipated that men in their environment would be preoccupied with defending reputation and responding to affronts, a construct with established links to tolerance of violence in honour-oriented cultures.

The results were consistent across the two countries. Participants who had been exposed to information depicting high economic inequality subsequently reported significantly greater acceptance of traditional male role norms than those exposed to the low-inequality condition. The same pattern emerged for gender essentialism: inequality made people more inclined to see men and women as fundamentally different kinds of beings whose characteristics are innate rather than socially produced. In contrast, the manipulation did not move expectations of masculine honour concerns, suggesting that inequality’s psychological reach, while real, is selective rather than universal across all gender-related belief systems.

The theoretical significance of these findings lies in what they imply about the mechanisms connecting economic arrangements to gender attitudes. The authors situate their work within the broader literature on how inequality shapes social perception, including studies showing that unequal contexts enhance inferences that the normative climate is competitive, and that perceived inequality exacerbates zero-sum thinking and intergroup competition. If economic inequality signals a world in which dominance, competition and status-seeking pay off, then traditional masculinity, which valorises precisely those traits, may appear functionally adapted to that world. Gender essentialism, meanwhile, may serve a system-justifying function: if gender differences are perceived as natural and inevitable, existing gender hierarchies seem harder to contest, a logic long explored in system justification theory.

The stakes of these effects are considerable, because both of the belief systems that inequality strengthened are known correlates of problematic outcomes. Traditional male role norms have been linked in meta-analytic work to male violence against women, and gender essentialism is associated with support for gender inequality and with backlash against those who violate gender expectations. Prior research has also documented associations between economic factors, including regional income inequality and male unemployment, and rates of intimate partner violence. The new experiments do not demonstrate that inequality causes violence, but they sketch a plausible psychological pathway by which unequal economic conditions could reinforce the ideological soil in which such violence is more readily tolerated.

The null result for masculine honour concerns is itself informative. Honour concerns are typically rooted in long-standing cultural logics, prevalent in Mediterranean societies among others, that regulate reputation and family conduct. The authors’ finding that a brief inequality manipulation shifted role norms and essentialist beliefs but not honour expectations suggests that some gender-related cognitions are more contextually malleable than others. Norms about what men should aspire to, and beliefs about the naturalness of gender difference, may function as flexible ideological responses to perceived economic conditions, whereas honour frameworks may be too deeply culturally embedded to be nudged by a single experimental message about wealth distribution.

Methodologically, the study benefits from features that strengthen confidence in its conclusions. Both experiments were preregistered, with hypotheses and planned analyses deposited in advance, and all materials, measures, databases and preregistration forms are publicly available through the Open Science Framework. The replication of the core effects in two different national contexts, Spain and Italy, addresses a persistent weakness in psychological science, where findings from a narrow range of Western samples are often overgeneralised, although the authors and the wider literature acknowledge that both countries remain relatively similar, Western European settings. Exploratory analyses of the moderating role of participants’ own gender were preregistered and reported in supplementary materials, and additional psychometric evidence for the traditional male role norms measure was gathered during peer review.

The broader message of the research is that economic inequality is not just a matter of income distributions and macroeconomic indicators; it is a psychological force that can reshape how entire societies think about gender. If widening the gap between rich and poor nudges people toward stricter ideas about manhood and more essentialist views of women and men, then policies aimed at reducing inequality may carry benefits that extend well beyond economic wellbeing, potentially softening the ideological foundations of gender discrimination and violence. Conversely, societies experiencing rising inequality, as documented in global inequality reporting, may face a compounding problem in which economic disparity and rigid gender ideologies reinforce one another. The findings from Granada and Chieti suggest that the fight for gender equality and the fight for economic equality may, in the end, be the same fight.

Subject of Research: Psychological effects of economic inequality on gender-related beliefs, including traditional male role norms and gender essentialism

Article Title: Examining gender-specific outcomes of economic inequality: acceptance of traditional male role norms and gender essentialism

Article References: Examining gender-specific outcomes of economic inequality: acceptance of traditional male role norms and gender essentialism. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10143-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10143-3

Keywords: economic inequality, gender essentialism, traditional male role norms, masculinity, social psychology, gender stereotypes, masculine honour, system justification, gender inequality, violence against women, experimental psychology, social perception