Cultures rate women’s faces more attractive than men’s

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany and other institutions studied attractiveness ratings from 28,500 people around the world.

They analyzed data from 52 prior studies, totaling over 1.5 million individual face ratings from 76 countries, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.

The team discovered that people consistently rated women’s faces as more attractive than men’s, a difference they termed the “gender attractiveness gap.” Women showed a stronger preference, rating other women’s faces significantly higher than men’s faces, while both sexes gave similar low ratings to men. The attractiveness gap lessened when raters viewed older individuals or people of African descent, and disappeared when people evaluated their own faces.

The researchers connected the gap to differences in facial structure, noting that women tend to have rounder faces and men more angular ones. However, they also suggested that women might appreciate each other’s beauty more and acknowledged that the study had limited sensitivity to specific aesthetics in African cultures. The study confirms a long-held assumption about human perception, initially noted by Charles Darwin, but lacked previous large-scale empirical support.