People Across Cultures Find Women’s Faces to Be More Attractive Than Men’s, a New Study Suggests

In many species of wild animals, males have flashier features than females to help them attract mates. But scientists have long noticed that humans seem to be an exception, with women often being considered the “fairer sex”

Margherita Bassi | Daily Correspondent

June 9, 2026 3:14 p.m.

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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.

Evolutionary biologists “took it for granted that women are the fairer sex and theorized about what evolutionary principle could have led to this phenomenon, but the existence of the gap itself was never actually tested,” study co-author Eugen Wassiliwizky, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample.

Wassiliwizky and his colleagues investigated more than 1.5 million individual face ratings from 52 previously published studies spanning 76 countries. The compiled studies did not explicitly aim to investigate sex differences in attractiveness. Raters, who were from nations including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan, based their decisions on front-view facial photographs of real people with natural or neutral expressions.

The meta-analysis gathered the largest-ever collection of data on facial attractiveness, the researchers say.

The findings revealed that people of various backgrounds rated women’s faces, on average, as more attractive than men’s, an effect the authors call the gender attractiveness gap (GAP). What’s more, women rated other women’s faces substantially higher than men’s faces, while men’s faces received similarly low ratings from both sexes, the team found.

Additionally, the GAP dropped when raters viewed faces of elderly individuals and those of people of African descent. And it didn’t exist when people rated their own attractiveness.

So, what’s behind the pronounced preference for women’s faces? Mapping facial structures helped the team come up with features that were more associated with facial femininity or masculinity. For instance, women tended to have rounder faces while men’s faces usually had more angular shapes. These differences seemed to play a large role in the measured GAP, analyses revealed.

The GAP “can be partly explained by differences in facial structure, but not entirely,” Wassiliwizky says in a statement.

Women might find other women’s faces more attractive than men’s because they’re appreciating “each other’s beauty more,” Wassiliwizky told New Scientist’s Michael Le Page last year, after the study was posted to the preprint server bioRxiv. Knowing other people will scrutinize whatever data they input into the computer might also influence their ratings, he said.

Evolutionary biologist Karel Kleisner, of Charles University in the Czech Republic, who wasn’t involved in the study, applauds the work’s confirmation of the GAP, although he notes that local beauty standards might also affect ratings. “A major limitation of the study is its lack of sensitivity to the specific aesthetics of African beauty,” he told New Scientist.

Margherita Bassi | Read More

Margherita Bassi is a freelance journalist and trilingual storyteller. Her work has appeared in publications including BBC Travel, Discover magazine, Live Science, Atlas Obscura and Hidden Compass.