“Why can’t we live in a world where women don’t have to think about these things? It’s heartbreaking to hear of things women close to me have dealt with,” Chaney said. “It would be nice to work towards a world where there is no difference between the heat maps in these sets of images. That is the hope of the public health discipline.”

I’m not convinced this phenomenon would disappear in a world where women don’t have to think about these things. It could be an evolutionary psychology thing. Would have to repeat the experiment in different societies and environments to find out.