Sex and Age Differences in Self-Esteem
Do they hold up across cultures?
In this post, I’d like to discuss a fascinating 2016 paper by Wiebke Bleidorn and colleagues. The paper is about sex and age differences in self-esteem: one of the best-studied concepts in psychology.
According to earlier research, men on average have higher self-esteem than women, and self-esteem rises with age. Most of that research, however, was conducted in the Western world. Bleidorn and her collaborators wanted to know whether the differences would be found in other cultures.
To address that question, they administered a self-esteem measure to nearly a million people from 48 countries, offering the first large-scale cross-cultural survey of sex and age differences in self-esteem.
The main findings are summarized in the following two graphs. The first shows levels of self-esteem for men and women by age, averaged across the 48 nations in the study. Consistent with the Western data, men have higher self-esteem than women, and self-esteem rises for both sexes from the teen years to middle age. This suggests that the previously documented sex and age differences aren’t just a Western idiosyncrasy, but transcend cultural boundaries.
The second graph shows the same sex-by-age pattern, but for each of the 48 nations separately. As you can see, the basic pattern replicates in the vast majority of nations, but with some interesting variations in the size of the sex differences across time, and also a handful of exceptions.