Both men and women rate female faces as more attractive

Across cultures and age groups, people consistently rate female faces as more attractive than male faces. A massive new data analysis confirms this long-debated pattern, revealing that gender shapes our aesthetic judgments in unexpected ways. The research was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In many sexually reproducing species, males are the more visually striking sex, displaying features like extravagant tail feathers or singing elaborate melodies. These traits evolved to attract female mates, who typically select a partner. Because females invest heavily in offspring, they set the selective pressure driving male visual ornamentation.

Across languages and cultures, people often refer to women as the beautiful sex, prompting evolutionary biologists to propose reasons for this human exception. One idea relates to facial averageness, which refers to how closely a face matches a population’s standard structural layout. Biologists propose that high averageness signals greater genetic diversity and a strong immune system. Studies routinely show that women possess higher facial averageness than men, making them statistically more likely to be perceived as attractive.

Another theory points to the role of hormones during human development. High testosterone levels in men influence bone structure to signal physical dominance, but extreme facial masculinity is not universally preferred because it can also signal reduced parental investment. Female faces tend to retain youthful features into adulthood, including larger eyes, rounder contours, and smaller noses. This phenomenon is known as babyfacedness, and it reliably attracts visual attention while eliciting positive responses from observers.

Despite centuries of scientific speculation and cultural assumptions, researchers had never systematically tested whether people actually find women universally more attractive than men. Eugen Wassiliwizky, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany, led a team to investigate this widespread belief. Working with researchers from institutions in Australia, Czechia, and Sweden, Wassiliwizky wanted to see if the supposed gender attractiveness gap holds up to scientific scrutiny and whether it is shared equally by men and women.

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To evaluate this question, the researchers conducted a massive mathematical review of existing attractiveness data. They pooled results from 52 distinct facial attractiveness studies published over the past decade. This collection included information from 76 countries and involved roughly 28,500 raters evaluating 17,000 distinct facial photographs. In total, the team analyzed 1.5 million individual ratings, mathematically standardizing the scores so different studies could be compared directly on a common curve.

The results revealed a reliable gender attractiveness gap favoring female faces. Across almost every demographic studied, raters gave female faces higher scores than male ones. Both male and female raters placed male faces relatively low on the scale. The team noted that this difference emerged regardless of the rater’s age, sexual orientation, or cultural background. They checked their data spread to ensure the results were not skewed by highly attractive female models volunteering for photo studies at unusual rates, finding that the scores fell along a normal distribution curve.

The data showed an unexpected secondary pattern when broken down by the sex of the rater. The gap was decidedly largest among female evaluators. Women showed a strong tendency to rate other women highly, creating a wider margin between how they scored female and male faces. The researchers suggested this same sex generosity might stem from cultural norms. Across many societies, women are socialized to value physical appearance and may experience a sense of peer solidarity, prompting them to evaluate other women more favorably.

Male raters exhibited their own unique tendency in the analyzed dataset. On average, men assigned lower scores across the board compared to female raters. This male stringency bias matches behaviors observed in entirely different fields, such as online consumer behavior, where men generally leave lower ratings for products and movies than women do. The researchers observed that as male raters aged, they became even more stringent in their evaluations of faces compared to their female counterparts.

To understand the biology behind the ratings, the team used advanced geometric computer models to measure the physical structures of the photographed faces. They isolated a measurement called sexual shape dimorphism, which maps out the holistic structural differences between typical male and typical female facial layouts. After mathematically removing the influence of facial averageness and perceived youthfulness, the team found that structural shape differences explained about a third of the attractiveness gap among female raters, and nearly half of the gap among male raters.

The structural geometry did not explain everything. Even when researchers accounted for variations in masculine and feminine face shapes, female raters continued to score women higher than men. This indicates that aesthetic judgments rely on a combination of innate physical structures and deep seated societal expectations rather than biology alone.

When looking at individual self assessments, the gap completely vanished. Six of the collected studies contained data where participants rated their own facial attractiveness. In those specific tasks, men and women assigned themselves roughly equal scores, demonstrating that the gender attractiveness gap only manifests when humans evaluate the appearance of other people.

While the study offers robust population level data, the authors noted several boundaries to their conclusions. They cautioned against assuming that the gap is entirely the result of evolutionary sexual selection. Aesthetic preferences are just one part of human mate choice, and simple attractiveness scores in a laboratory setting do not directly translate to real world reproductive success.

The rating patterns also shifted among specific racial demographics. Most notably, male raters demonstrated no measurable attractiveness gap when evaluating Black faces. Female raters still preferred Black female faces over Black male faces, but that particular difference was entirely erased when the researchers mathematically controlled for facial shape differences. Previous anthropological research suggests that some populations of African descent display lower facial shape dimorphism than European populations, leading the authors to recommend future studies explore culturally specific beauty standards across different global populations.

Finally, the researchers emphasized that their dataset relied strictly on neutral facial expressions in two dimensional photographs. While efforts were made in the original studies to remove makeup and jewelry, real world attraction involves countless other variables. Moving forward, investigations will need to look at how body language, dynamic expressions, skin texture, and conversational cues alter or amplify the way people perceive gender and physical beauty in their daily lives.

The study, “The gender attractiveness gap,” was authored by Eugen Wassiliwizky, B. P. Zietsch, Karel Kleisner, and Fredrik Ullén.