Overview
- This week an international team led by the Max Planck Institute published an analysis of roughly 28,500 participants and more than 1.5 million face ratings that documents a consistent 'Gender Attractiveness Gap' with female faces rated higher on average.
- The gap is strongest in ratings made by women, who on average score other women substantially higher than they score men.
- Self-ratings do not show a sex difference, and the study also found that men tend to judge faces more strictly than women, although this effect is smaller and varies by culture.
- Quantitative facial-structure measurements (morphometrics) explain a large portion of the gap but leave a meaningful share unexplained, leaving open biological and social explanations.
- The authors published their data and analysis code to encourage follow-up work, and they situate the finding in a long debate since Darwin about why humans reverse the typical animal pattern of males being the more ornamented sex.