'Mirror, mirror, who is the most attractive of all?' Major study crowns women over men

The most surprising revelation of the study — even women raters voted for women. While structurally manipulating the face pictures, the scientists found that as soon they started to drop the feminine features, the attractiveness ratings started to fall.

Male peacocks have huge colourful tails, male lions have majestic manes but when it comes to humans — the scales get reversed with women outscoring men in attractiveness, a global study found a major attractiveness gender gap in the world.

Charles Darwin, a revolutionary figure in evolutionary sciences had made a note of an unusual trend in human attractiveness long back when he wrote his book The Descent of Man where he observed that unlike other animals where males were more ornamented and flashy as opposed to the female sex, humans tend to do the opposite.

Although, he chose not to focus much on this absurdity.

Years later, a large cross-cultural meta-analysis of male and female attractiveness has found that female faces are rated to be more attractive by both men and women alike. 

It also noted that evolutionary forces such as mate choice was alone not the reason for voting women over men but the facial features associated with a woman’s face were also a social preference among both the sexes.

However, this gender gap disappeared when the participants were asked to rate themselves.

The findings were consistent across cultures, sexes and even major ethnicities across the world.

Largest recollection of ‘attractiveness’ data

The large-scale study published in the Royal Society Publishing compiled the world’s largest database of smaller studies done on human attractiveness among both the sexes.

The lead author, Eugen Wassiliwizky and his team included 52 studies in 76 countries. The final dataset had 17,000 faces and about 30,000 raters which included mainly heterosexual males and females.

The mega-study analysed were indirectly connected to ‘attractiveness’, for instance how facial expressions changed attractiveness or if wearing masks changed attractiveness in people and others.

Hence, this large-scaled study aimed at throwing a straightforward question — who does the world rate to be more attractive among the two sexes?

The database collected was statistically standardized for each element to have equal footing in the final rating scale because different sub-studies had different scoring systems. 

It deliberately included data from diverse ethnic groups including — African, Asian, Caucasian, Latino, Middle Eastern and Multi-Ethnic.

The study also aimed at understanding what made women appear more attractive across cultures whether it was evolutionary forces, culture bias, societal stereotypes or something purely physical.

While the collection had raw, neutral images with least background disturbance, the study still acknowledged that the effects of self-grooming in the years before the picture was taken could not be negated as grooming was not just limited to hairstyle or make-up. Also, the lighting, photo quality and cultural beauty standard played the undertone behind every picture.

Women outscore men

Apart from analysing the social and biological forces that shaped the world’s preference on what they find ‘attractive’, the researchers also applied morphometry, a mathematical approach to study the facial structure of faces.

For this, they controlled two interfering factors – first, people generally underrate older people and secondly, people generally overrate those close to the ‘average’ attractive score as more attractive as they tend to view them as more stable and healthy.

After applying all the possible controls, the study found that an average female face is found to be more attractive than almost 60 percent of the male faces.

While structurally manipulating the face pictures, the scientists found that as soon they started to drop the feminine features, the attractiveness ratings started to fall.

This proved that something inherent about feminine features like a rounder face and softer features made it attractive and not just mating choice.

As per the Guardian, women’s faces may have a natural appeal because they have similar features to babies.

Wassiliwizky, the lead author also made an assumption that it could be possible that years of evolutionary forces have shaped the present female face but there is no evidence to show.

The researchers also observed that as people age, the gap between male attractiveness and female attractiveness tends to decrease because facial features shrink and become blurry.

Even women like women

The most surprising revelation of the study — even women raters voted for women.

Initially, the researchers thought of this as a statistical error of including a lot more societally ‘attractive’ females than men. But, later they found the graphs were smooth and no apparent bias had played out.

This made researchers realise that there is an existing, broader preference for feminine features which makes even women vouch for other women.

To be on a safer side, the researchers diluted the strong preference with some possible biases like — women deliberately supporting women and also some being shy to show feelings of attractiveness to the male photos. 

For males, their attractiveness was more clustered around a peak of a graph and showed less variability as compared to women.

Beyond older beliefs

From a larger point of view, the study demanded explanations beyond some foundational theories that shape understanding of human evolution.

Darwin’s Natural Selection propagated that attractiveness was a function of survival. A male finds a female attractive because of an innate tendency to procreate. However, the study showed that even women preferred facial structures of other women. So, this made scientists question if this attractiveness was beyond the evolutionary forces.

It also slightly diverted from Parental investment theory which postulates that the female sex is the ‘choosy’ one because it invests more in the biological process of reproduction. This makes the male sex to compete more closely with other males and it would have made more sense for them to be the more ‘attractive’ sex to buy attention from the females.