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Drawing from social dominance theory and the theory of sexualization in advertising, we hypothesized an inverted-U- shaped association between gender equality and the market location of sex-appeal businesses. We tested this hypothesis by regressing market entry location on gender equality for two different American franchise restaurant chains—one operating under a sex-appeal business model and one operating under a traditional model. As expected, results indicated an inverted-U- shaped curvilinear relationship between gender equality and market entry of sex-appeal businesses, such that sex-appeal businesses are not likely to locate in countries either with very low or very high levels of gender equality, but are more likely to locate in those countries with moderate levels of gender equality. We did not find an inverted-U-shaped relationship for the traditional business model. Implications …