This doesn’t surprise me at all. My evolutionary explanation (and I think that whatever explanation there is is evolutionary, not the media, which is just reflecting viewer and reader preferences) is that women compete more on their physical attractiveness to men (men compete on power and wealth), so both men and women are acutely aware of women’s…interesting…body features (which is also why women have less of a problem being physically attracted to other women than men to men).
This is an illustration of a pet peeve, though. I hate misleading scaling of graphs and bar charts. Because they chose to use $900 as a baseline, it makes it appear that the estimates have increased by more than an order of magnitude over two years, when in fact they have only doubled. It seems to me that doubling is bad enough without playing games with graphics.
The key policy implication is that if he can convince enough people that you didn’t earn your success, he’ll face less opposition when he tries to take the fruits of your success for himself. And that’s what this whole “you didn’t build it” thing is about. I’m not taking your property away — it was really mine all along!