In portraits, in poems, and in proverbs, the world has long insisted that women are the more beautiful sex. Charles Darwin puzzled over it. Artists have painted it. Advertisers have exploited it. But despite this deep-rooted assumption, no one had ever put it to a rigorous scientific test.
Now, a global team of psychologists and neuroscientists has done just that. Drawing on data from over 12,000 people and 11,000 facial images collected across 28 studies on five continents, researchers have confirmed what most suspected: across nearly every culture and age group studied, women’s faces are consistently rated as more attractive than men’s—by both men and women.
The Muse
In most animals, it’s the males who get the flashy traits—think peacock tails and lion manes—while females do the choosing. Yet humans, for all our evolutionary parallels, seem to have flipped the script. “Females are usually the choosy sex,” Eugen Wassiliwizky, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and the lead author of the new study, told New Scientist. “This is the mechanism that made males look more flamboyant.”
But in humans, from Renaissance paintings to romantic clichés, it’s women who are idealized. Darwin himself remarked on this reversal, noting that humans seem to be unusual in regarding females as “the fairer sex”. And yet, as the new study points out, the assumption that women are more attractive than men had never been directly and empirically tested—until now.
The team combed through a decade’s worth of open-access datasets that had been collected for other studies on facial attractiveness perception, research into topics like the effects of masks or emotional expressions on how we perceive others. In all, they compiled ratings from over 12,000 heterosexual participants across more than 50 countries, looking at how male and female raters scored male and female faces.
The results were clear. Female faces were rated as more attractive than male faces across nearly all regions and ethnic groups. This held true for both same-sex and opposite-sex raters, though the effect was strongest among women rating other women.
Physical Beauty—or Gendered Perception?
What makes a face attractive is not just in the eye of the beholder. It’s also in the bone structure.
To understand what was behind the “Gender Attractiveness Gap,” the researchers went a step further. They conducted a mediation analysis—essentially, a statistical test to see if the difference in ratings could be explained by differences in the facial structures of men and women.
They found that about two-thirds of the gap could be chalked up to “sexual shape dimorphism”—the subtle structural cues that make a face appear masculine or feminine. These include things like jawline shape, cheekbone prominence, and forehead curvature.
But the other third? That came down to something more intangible: knowing whether the person was male or female.
In other words, even when male and female faces were equally feminine or masculine in structure, raters still gave higher scores to faces they knew belonged to women.
The Paradox of Peer Generosity
One of the most surprising findings was who gave the highest ratings to female faces. Not men. Women.
That doesn’t square easily with evolutionary theories of mate selection. If women in the study were primarily heterosexual, why didn’t they rate men as more attractive?
Wassiliwizky offers a few theories. “Women might show solidarity to each other, or appreciate each other’s beauty more,” he suggests. It’s also possible, he says, that women evaluate male faces using more complex criteria—inferring things like personality or trustworthiness—which could dilute their ratings of pure physical appeal.
Social norms might also play a role. “They know the data that they type into the computer are scrutinised, so maybe they don’t feel comfortable with that,” Wassiliwizky adds. In other words, women might hesitate to rate male faces highly if they believe their answers will be judged.
Peer generosity—or even a form of beauty solidarity—might also explain the pattern. In many cultures, women are socialized from a young age to value appearance and are exposed to idealized images of female beauty more often than men are. This may make them more attuned to—and appreciative of—what makes a woman’s face aesthetically pleasing.
The Exceptions That Prove the Rule
There were outliers though. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region where the gender gap in attractiveness ratings was not statistically significant. Likewise, faces identified as African were the only group where male and female ratings did not differ too much.
Karel Kleisner, a co-author and evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, points out that “some populations in Africa have the least sexual dimorphism in faces.” In other words, male and female faces may be less structurally distinct there. Cultural aesthetics might also play a role: “A major limitation of the study is its lack of sensitivity to the specific aesthetics of African beauty,” Kleisner says.
These nuances are a reminder that beauty isn’t just biology. It’s also shaped by culture, identity, and context.
The findings open the door to deeper questions. Why do some cultures prize femininity so highly? Are these biases learned, inherited, or both? And how might these perceptions affect everything from dating to hiring to politics?
The findings were published in the preprint server bioRxiv.
