Women are rated prettier than men.
By other women too.
It seems ridiculous. But it’s true. The “gender attractiveness gap” is a thing. Centuries of language called women the beau sexe or the fairer sex, and researchers have finally checked the receipts. Dr. Eugen Wassiliwizky from the Max Planck Institute in Germany leads the charge. He says female faces beat out male faces across cultures, ignoring just about every other variable. The shocker? Women judge other women highest, while men get the lowest scores overall.
Think back to Darwin. The Victorian naturalist looked around the animal kingdom. He saw birds with fancy plumage, peacocks with bright tails. He figured those guys reproduced because females liked the flashiness. Sexual selection. Simple enough.
Darwin thought humans were the exception. He assumed men fought each other for resources or power, not because they looked like models. Evolutionary biologists have argued over this human oddity for decades. Everyone accepted women were the “fairer sex” as a fact, theorized about why it happened, but never actually tested if it was even true. Until now.
“Female faces are evaluated as more attractive than male Faces regardless of all the other factors”
The study isn’t small.
It isn’t local either. Wassiliwizky’s team grabbed the world’s biggest dataset on face ratings. They looked at 52 separate studies covering 76 countries. That’s over 1.5 million ratings. 17,000 different faces. Nearly 30,000 people doing the rating. The average woman’s face beats roughly 60 percent of all male faces. The gap is widest in Western cultures. It shifts a tiny bit depending on whether the rater is straight, gay, bisexual, or lesbian. The pattern holds up. The only time it breaks? When people rate themselves. Ego fills the cracks there.
Structure matters.
Men tend toward square jaws, rectangular faces. Women usually have softer, rounder features. The data shows we like rounder things. Maybe that’s biology. Maybe it’s not. The study doesn’t give us a reason, just a pattern. Wassiliwizky doubts culture alone explains something that appears globally. He wonders if it goes back to babies. Newborns have round faces. Maybe we are wired to find that shape appealing. But he warns against jumping to conclusions. We can’t prove sexual selection did it just because the trend exists. We have to be careful.
Aging kills the gap.
Susan Sontag wrote The Double Standard of Aging in 1972. She argued society tied women’s value to their looks, and their looks to youth. Men don’t get hit with that same hammer. This new research backs that up. The preference for female attractiveness drops steadily starting at 18. It shrinks year by year. By the time people hit their 80s?
The difference is gone.
The older we get, the more our faces converge. Structural differences shrink. Skin sags, lines form. Men and women end up looking more alike in terms of facial geometry. The “fairer” distinction melts away. Which leaves us wondering, how much of beauty is just bone structure versus skin? The gap closes when the skin fails. Maybe the whole thing was a surface level illusion to begin with. 🏳️
