A comprehensive new study has confirmed the existence of a "gender attractiveness gap," with women's faces consistently rated as more attractive than men's across cultures. However, this difference diminishes with age and virtually disappears by the time individuals reach their 80s.
Massive Dataset Analysis
Researchers compiled the world's largest dataset on facial attractiveness, drawing from 52 studies conducted in 76 countries. The dataset included over 1.5 million ratings of 17,000 faces from nearly 30,000 raters. The findings reveal that the average female face is rated more attractive than approximately 60% of male faces.
Dr. Eugen Wassiliwizky, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany, described the effect as "super robust" and observable across all cultures. "Female faces are evaluated as more attractive than male faces regardless of all the other factors," he said. "What is most surprising is that women give other women the highest ratings and give the lowest ratings to men."
Cross-Cultural Consistency
The gap was strongest in Western countries but remained evident across heterosexual, gay, bisexual, and lesbian raters. Interestingly, when men and women rated themselves, the gap disappeared. The study suggests that some of the effect is driven by sex differences in facial structure, with rounder faces generally perceived as more attractive.
Historical Context
The concept of women as "the fairer sex" has been reflected in language for centuries, from English to German ("das schöne Geschlecht") and French ("le beau sexe"). Charles Darwin noted that while male animals often sport elaborate adornments, human males seemed to buck this trend. Evolutionary biologists have long debated the peculiarity, but the existence of the gap itself had never been empirically tested until now.
Wassiliwizky believes that more than culture is 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 he cautioned that the data cannot confirm this directly.
Age and Attractiveness
The study also found that the preference for female over male faces declines steadily from age 18 until it vanishes around age 80. This aligns with observations by writer Susan Sontag, who argued in her 1972 essay "The Double Standard of Aging" that society equates women's value with beauty and youth, but does not impose the same standards on men.
"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."
The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
