/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/87/3f/873fdf6a-37c3-4547-87af-aafd9f1dd950/smithsonian_feature_images_10.png)
People Across Cultures Find Women's Faces to Be More Attractive Than Men's, a New Study Suggests
Key takeaways
- In many other species, however, males showcase flashy features to attract female mates.
- The inconsistency has long caught the attention of scientists, including English naturalist Charles Darwin, but they lacked clear empirical evidence to back it up.
- Now, almost 150 years after Darwin’s death, a new study involving about 28,500 participants worldwide has found that, on average, people deem women’s faces more attractive than men’s.
Among humans, however, women are popularly described as the "fairer sex." Paul Wontorra and Eugen Wassiliwizky / Pexels Women are, at least anecdotally, often considered to be more beautiful than men—the so-called fairer sex. In many other species, however, males showcase flashy features to attract female mates.
The inconsistency has long caught the attention of scientists, including English naturalist Charles Darwin, but they lacked clear empirical evidence to back it up.
Now, almost 150 years after Darwin’s death, a new study involving about 28,500 participants worldwide has found that, on average, people deem women’s faces more attractive than men’s. While the results don’t explain exactly why this “gender attractiveness gap” exists, the findings are consistent across sexes, cultures, races and age groups, researchers report in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on May 27.