Why Women’s Faces Score Higher on Attractiveness — Even Among Women

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics assembled the largest dataset ever of facial-attractiveness ratings: 52 studies from 76 countries. The final dataset contains more than 1.5 million ratings for about 17,000 faces, submitted by nearly 30,000 raters.

Main findings

• On average, female faces were rated as more attractive than about 60% of male faces.
• The pattern held across cultures and sexual orientations — heterosexual, gay, bisexual, and lesbian respondents also tended to rate female faces higher.
• Women gave the highest attractiveness ratings to other women, while they gave the lowest ratings to male faces.
• When people rated their own faces, researchers found no gender gap.

What could explain it

Part of the difference reflects sex-based variations in facial structure: on average, male faces look more rectangular, while female faces look rounder. The results show that both men and women tend to prefer rounder faces.
“It’s a very robust effect — we see it across cultures. Female faces are judged more attractive regardless of other factors,” says Dr. Yevhen Vasylyvitsky. He adds that although these global patterns suggest culture isn’t the whole story, researchers should be cautious about evolutionary explanations: “Perhaps hundreds of thousands of years of sexual selection shaped female facial features, but our data can’t confirm that.”
The researchers also suggest another possibility: people might like round faces because they resemble infant features.

How the effect changes with age

The study found a clear age pattern: the advantage for female faces steadily declines from age 18 and nearly disappears by about 80. The older the faces, the smaller the difference in perceived attractiveness between male and female faces. As people age, structural facial differences fade, which may explain part of the narrowing gap.
Susan Sontag highlighted this idea back in her 1972 essay “The Double Standard of Aging”: society equates a woman’s value with her beauty and youth while judging men by different criteria — and now large-scale empirical data echo that observation.
The study confirms the “gender gap in attractiveness” — a global, persistent pattern in which female faces are rated higher on average than male faces. At the same time, the gap shrinks with age and almost disappears in old age, and researchers need to investigate its causes further and interpret them cautiously.
Reporting from The Guardian