Across cultures and age groups, people consistently rate female faces as more attractive than male faces. A major new data analysis confirms this long-debated pattern, revealing that gender shapes our aesthetic judgments in unexpected ways. The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
In many sexually reproducing species, the male is the more visually striking sex, displaying traits such as extravagant tail feathers and singing elaborate melodies. These traits evolved to attract female mates, who typically select partners. Because females invest heavily in their offspring, they set up selective pressures that encourage visual ornamentation in males.
Across languages and cultures, people often refer to women as the fairer sex, leading evolutionary biologists to propose reasons for this human anomaly. One idea relates to facial meanness, which refers to the degree to which a face conforms to the standard structural layout of a population. Biologists have proposed that greater meanness indicates greater genetic diversity and a stronger immune system. Studies regularly show that women have more average facial features and are statistically more likely to be perceived as attractive than men.
Another theory points to the role of hormones in human development. High testosterone levels in men influence their skeletal structure and indicate physical superiority, but extreme facial masculinity is not generally preferred as it can indicate decreased parental investment. Women’s faces tend to retain youthful features into adulthood, such as large eyes, rounded contours, and small noses. This phenomenon is known as babyface, and it definitely attracts visual attention and elicits a positive response from the observer.
Despite centuries of scientific speculation and cultural assumptions, researchers have never systematically tested whether people actually find women more universally attractive than men. Eugen Wasiliski, a cognitive neuropsychologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, led a team investigating this widely held belief. Working with researchers from institutions in Australia, the Czech Republic and Sweden, Wasiliwisky wanted to see whether the supposed gender attractiveness gap would hold up to scientific scrutiny, and whether it was shared equally by men and women.
To assess this question, researchers conducted an extensive mathematical review of existing attractiveness data. They combined the results of 52 different facial attractiveness studies published over the past decade. The collection includes information from 76 countries, and approximately 28,500 raters rated 17,000 different headshots. The team analyzed a total of 1.5 million individual ratings and mathematically standardized the scores, allowing different studies to be directly compared on a common curve.
The results revealed a difference in the attractiveness of trustworthy men and women who prefer female faces. Across nearly every demographic examined, raters gave female faces higher scores than male faces. Both male and female raters placed male faces relatively low on the scale. The researchers noted that this difference appeared regardless of the rater’s age, sexual orientation, or cultural background. They checked the spread of the data to ensure the results were not skewed by highly attractive female models who volunteered for the photo survey at an unusual rate, and found that the scores followed a normal distribution curve.
Categorizing the data by rater gender showed an unexpected quadratic pattern. The difference was clearly greatest among female raters. Women were more likely to rate other women highly, leading to large differences between how they scored female faces and male faces. The researchers suggested that this same-sex tolerance may stem from cultural norms. In many societies, women are socialized to value appearance, and experiencing a sense of peer solidarity may lead them to evaluate other women more favorably.
Male raters showed unique trends in the dataset analyzed. On average, men assigned lower scores overall than female raters. This male strictness bias is consistent with behavior observed in disparate domains, such as online consumer behavior, where men generally rate products and movies lower than women. The researchers observed that as male raters got older, their facial ratings became more severe compared to female raters.
To understand the biology behind the assessment, the team used advanced geometric computer models to measure the physical structure of the photographed faces. They isolated a measurement called sexual shape dimorphism, mapping the overall structural differences between typical male and typical female facial layouts. After mathematically removing the influence of perceptions of facial averageness and youthfulness, the researchers found that differences in structural shape accounted for about a third of the difference in attractiveness between female raters and nearly half of the gap between male raters.
Structural geometry alone does not explain everything. Even when researchers took into account the differences between masculine and feminine face shapes, female raters continued to score women higher than men. This shows that aesthetic judgments depend not only on biology but on a combination of innate physical structures and deep-seated social expectations.
When looking at individual self-evaluation, the difference completely disappeared. Six of the collected studies included data in which participants rated their own facial attractiveness. On these particular tasks, men and women assigned themselves roughly the same scores. This shows that the difference in attractiveness between men and women only appears when humans evaluate the appearance of others.
Although this study provides robust population-level data, the authors noted that there are some boundaries to their conclusions. They cautioned against assuming that this gap was entirely the result of evolutionary sexual selection. Aesthetic preferences are only one part of human mate selection, and simple attractiveness scores in a laboratory setting do not directly translate into real-world reproductive success.
Rating patterns also varied among specific racial groups. Most notably, male raters showed no measurable attractiveness gap when rating black faces. Female raters still preferred black female faces to black male faces, but when the researchers mathematically controlled for differences in face shape, that particular difference was completely erased. Previous anthropological research suggests that some populations of African descent have less facial dimorphism than European populations, and the authors recommend that future research explore culturally specific beauty standards across different groups around the world.
Finally, the researchers emphasized that their dataset relies strictly on neutral facial expressions in two-dimensional photographs. While the original study attempted to remove cosmetics and jewelry, real-world attractiveness involves a myriad of other variables. Future research will need to examine how body language, dynamic facial expressions, skin texture, and conversational cues change or amplify people’s perceptions of gender and physical beauty in their daily lives.
The study, “The Gap in Attractiveness Between Men and Women”, was authored by Eugen Wasiliski, BP Zietsch, Karel Kreisner, and Fredrik Uhlen.
