Class and gender intersect differently across cultures to shape social attitudes

When people judge how much they like, respect, or want to engage with someone they know little about, two factors carry particular weight: gender and socioeconomic status. Social psychology has studied both at length, mostly in isolation. A study published in PLOS ONE on February 18, 2026, examines how the two interact - and finds that the interaction is not symmetrical, nor is it consistent across cultures.

The study design: nine countries, 2,714 participants

Marie Isabelle Weissflog of Ruhr-Universitat Bochum in Germany and the University of York in the United Kingdom led an analysis of survey data from Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants read descriptions of hypothetical men and women with varying levels of education, income, and occupational status, then rated how much they would like, respect, or wish to engage with each person. The sample of 2,714 participants represented a range of countries with different economic development levels and gender norm profiles.

Higher income and education help women more than men

Overall, participants responded more positively to people with higher education, income, and occupational status - an expected result. The asymmetry emerged in the size of the effect by gender. Higher income and education produced more strongly positive attitude shifts for women than for men. The reverse held at the low end: low income and low occupational status pushed attitudes toward men more negatively than it pushed attitudes toward women.

Read plainly: reaching a high-status position appears to confer a stronger social boost on women than on men, while falling to a low-status position carries a heavier social penalty for men. Neither direction cancels out the underlying gender attitudes - they layer on top of them.

Conservative gender norms amplify both effects

The interaction between class and gender was not uniform across the nine countries studied. In societies with more conservative gender norms, both asymmetries were more pronounced - high status helped women more, and low status hurt men more, compared to societies with more egalitarian gender norms.

An additional pattern emerged in countries with higher overall inequality, such as Brazil and India. There, status and gender exerted weaker influence on social attitudes than in lower-inequality countries. The researchers suggest a tentative explanation: in high-inequality contexts, respondents may attribute low status more to structural circumstances than to individual characteristics or effort, making it less diagnostic of a person's worth.

What the findings suggest for addressing inequality

The study's authors emphasize that their results underscore the practical importance of intersectionality - the idea that gender and class do not operate as independent variables in social life, but interact in ways that produce distinct outcomes. Policies aimed at gender equity that ignore class, or class-focused interventions that ignore gender, may miss how the two factors compound each other.

"If we want to tackle the growing inequalities we are witnessing in many countries, it is important to understand how socioeconomic status and class inequalities emerge and impact how people and social groups perceive and act towards one another," the authors write. "Our findings show that looking at status/class in isolation is only part of the picture."

Limitations to keep in mind

The study used hypothetical descriptions rather than real individuals, which controls for confounding variables but may not fully capture how status signals function in complex, real-world social interactions. Participants rated targets based on brief written profiles - educational level, income bracket, occupation - without the nuanced, accumulated information that typically shapes real social judgments.

The nine-country sample, while broader than most studies in this area, is still unrepresentative of global attitudes. Regions including much of sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are absent. The mechanisms driving the observed patterns - whether status signals shift perceived competence, warmth, legitimacy, or threat - also remain to be specified by follow-up work. The survey measures attitudes, not behavior, and the relationship between the two is imperfect.

The findings appear in PLOS ONE, an open-access journal, meaning the full dataset and methodology are publicly available for replication and extension.