A comprehensive new study has confirmed that women's faces are consistently rated as more attractive than men's, even by female raters. However, this perceived gap diminishes with age and nearly disappears by the time individuals reach their 80s, researchers have reported.
Global Dataset on Facial Attractiveness
The research, led by Dr Eugen Wassiliwizky of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany, compiled the world's largest dataset on facial attractiveness. It drew on 52 studies conducted in 76 countries, encompassing over 1.5 million ratings of 17,000 faces from nearly 30,000 raters.
“This is a super robust effect and we see it across cultures. Female faces are evaluated as more attractive than male faces regardless of all the other factors,” said Dr Wassiliwizky. “What is most surprising is that women give other women the highest ratings and give the lowest ratings to men.”
The 'Gender Attractiveness Gap'
The findings appear to confirm the existence of a “gender attractiveness gap,” an observation reflected in centuries of language that present women as “the fairer sex,” “das schöne Geschlecht,” and “le beau sexe,” among others. The analysis found that the average female face is rated more attractive than about 60% of male faces. The gap was strongest in Western countries and varied slightly with sexual orientation, but was still evident across heterosexual, gay, bisexual, and lesbian raters. Interestingly, when men and women rated themselves, the gap disappeared.
Evolutionary Perspectives
Charles Darwin, the Victorian naturalist, noted that in the animal kingdom, males often sport elaborate adornments due to sexual selection. However, he believed humans were different, with men competing for women through wealth and power. Evolutionary biologists have debated this peculiarity ever since.
“They took it for granted that women are the fairer sex and theorised about what evolutionary principle could have led to this phenomenon, but the existence of the gap itself was never actually tested,” said Wassiliwizky.
Structural Differences and Age
Some of the effect is driven by sex differences in facial structure. On average, men have more rectangular faces while women have more rounded faces. The results suggest both men and women tend to find rounder faces more attractive. Details are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The study does not explain the reason for the general preference for female faces, but Wassiliwizky believes there is more than culture at play. “Usually when we see an effect across the whole world it’s hard to see a purely cultural explanation for that,” he said. It is possible that hundreds of thousands of years of sexual selection have shaped female faces, but “we can’t infer that from our data, we have to be cautious,” he added. It may be that more rounded faces appeal for other reasons, perhaps because they are more similar to babies’ faces.
In her 1972 essay, The Double Standard of Aging, the American writer Susan Sontag argued that society equated the value of women with beauty and their beauty with youth, but did not impose the same standards on men. In the study, the preference for female over male faces dropped steadily from 18 years old until vanishing at about 80 years old.
“The older the faces, the less we see a gap between the perceived attractiveness of male and female faces,” Wassiliwizky said. “Male and female faces become more and more similar with age, the structural differences shrink, and this might be the reason the gap is melting.”
