I’m curious. Do you really feel that you can’t distinguish most male faces from most female faces (recognizing that there is some percentage of overlap, as there is in most human features)?
I’m not sure whether I could tell in the total absence of facial hair, adam’s apple, hair style and other clues. And these days I’d have to include eyebrows. Sure, it’s easy when we consider “average” examples, but there are way too many exceptions . . . especially in the very young and very old.
I’m pretty sure you would do much better than you think you could. Research has shown that most adults are very good at such distinctions.
From this article (link to download pdf):
The dimorphism mainly develops in adolescence, so that many children may not be easily distinguishable.
Classic scene -
It wasn’t an official instruction, but I was STRONGLY AND CLEARLY warned NOT to trust my ability to distinquish male from female faces when I went to the Philippines.
The warning made me look quite hard, and I surely could not tell on many of them.
It’s interesting. I think of myself as someone with poor facial recognition, but I did well on this test. Missed one on the upright children, none on the adults, and got a 67% on the inverted children.
I wonder why I’m so convinced I have very poor facial recognition skills. I always make a point of looking at what someone is wearing to identify them later.
Yeah, I took “The Crying Game” over to a friend’s house once; I knew the twist, but neither he nor his son caught on until the reveal. Whereas another friend caught on to “Color of Night” right away, and I hadn’t a clue.
I think a lot of our “recognition” is driven by other clues; plus the obvious ones are not the issue - let’s say you could assign, say, 80% of faces accurately to gender. That would still leave a lot of ambiguous ones. What does the OP consider validation of his thesis? Better than random, 99%, or somewhere in between?
What bothers me about a lot of fantasy art is that the sword-wielding heroines also seem to have a jawline like Arnold Schwarznegger- not sure what that says about geek fantasies, or the obsessions of comic book artists.
there’s the whole discussion too, that women are 'softer" and less square-jawed because the adaptive evolution of females is to mimic youthful characteristics somewhat to appear younger and thus more likely to be early in child-bearing age. Hence also there’s the appeal of less body hair, blonde (a mimicry of fairer hair being an indicator of youth), and smaller size.
i would be curious how discernable male and female faces are before puberty. It would seem to me that the difference is significantly less before hormones put on the finishing touches, meaning taht hormone issues could have an effect on this too.
And we have a winner. This and the feminization pictures cited above (I just saw a YouTube set of time laps over 36 months of a trans-sex patient. SerenDipity).
I can’t say I had much of a problem when I went to the Philippines. But I may not have gone to the same bars as you did.
Really? What’s the difference?
What are those and how are they relevant?
Movies in which you’re surprised about the sex of a character.
I am willing to believe that you may have Prosopagnosia, but I don’t believe for one second that sexual dimorphism in faces is a concept you have never heard of before.
<one off> Among insects, there are species that exhibit huge sexual dimorphism. One wouldn’t think male and female Black Widow spiders are even the same species just looking at their faces. Male Praying Mantises don’t even have faces after mating !!! </one off>
How quickly they forget. 1992 - Crying Game has 6 oscar nominations, won one, hit song from the movie, incredible media buzz. Which is why it amazed me that my friend did not know what it was about.
It says they eliminated hairstyles and makeup, but did they eliminate stubble and eyebrow tweezing? Those are two of the biggest signs, I would think.
[what the hell, I thought I already answered this. Must have hit preview instead of submit.]
Males have a bigger jaw, kind of more rectangular. Their facial structure is longer, female structure is rounder. Male cats look like panthers, females look like kittycats. Eh, they all look like kittycats.
I doubt very much those are the “biggest signs.” The article says the male faces were clean shaven. Male and female eyebrows tend to be different even without tweezing. The photos were also pixelated to various degrees, which would also tend to minimize the importance of such minor alterations.
Even with most clean shaven men, you can tell the presence of a tiny bit of stubble.
I think you might be confusing two sources here.
The study that you cited discussed pixelating the pictures to various degrees. However the quote that you cited about people being able to determine the genders without cues from hairstyles or makeup was not the conclusion of the cited study which used pixelated pictures. It was cited in that article from another study, and it’s nowhere stated that that other source study used pixelatd pictures.
Why would you want to compare pics of clean shaven men? Our species obviously evolved with men exhibiting more facial hair than women. It’s an artificial trait to shave facial hair, and would seem to violate the question in the OP.