Women Rate Men With A Lower Waist-to-Chest Ratio as More Attractive

Trending News: How To Tailor Your Workouts To Be More Attractive To Women

Long Story Short

A new study using eye-tracking has found that when evaluating men’s attractiveness, women look for a lower waist-to-chest ratio.

Long Story

Ever wondered what should be top of your workout routine? Abs? Legs? Arms? Sometimes it feels like there are too many options.

Well, science has done you a solid. According to a new study published in Evolutionary Psychology, women direct their visual attention toward specific areas of men’s bodies when assessing attractiveness. In particular, researchers found that women directed most of their visual attention to the upper part of a man’s body.

The study involved 90 Mexican American women aged 18 to 38 viewing different versions of a photo of a young caucasian man in his early 20s, manipulated to adjust his body shape while researchers logged the viewers’ gaze using an eye-tracking device. Women tended to first direct their gaze at the chest, followed by the head, midriff and then the lower portions of the body.

The research also asked participants to rate the different versions of the photo on a six point scale, ranging from "extremely attractive" to "not attractive." Women were more likely to rate the photo as attractive when it depicted a lower waist-to-chest ratio. Basically: men with larger, more muscular upper bodies were rated as more attractive. This was regardless of factors such as facial and chest hair.

The final aspect of the experiment involved conceptive risk. In short, the participants were asked about their menstrual cycle to assess their conceptive risk and whether it had an impact on their visual behaviour. The conceptive risk seemed not to have a meaningful impact on many of the measurements taken — fixation count, first fixation, gaze duration — but did have a negative relationship with the total time a subject spent with an image.

“To our knowledge, our particular use of the eye tracker with cyclic changes is one of the first studies to investigate this phenomenon,” Texas A&M University’s Ray Garza, an author on the study, told PsyPost in an interview. “Psychology is beginning to use more precise instruments in attraction research to quantifiably measure attention, instead of using self report measures that may miss information.”

The one caveat as far as Garza is concerned is that the menstrual cycle data was supplied by questionnaire rather than ovulation tests. He’s looking to update the results with that data soon. Regardless, now you know: if you want to attract the right kind of attention, your best bet is to either get a massive chest, or shed some belly fat.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question

So why Mexican-American women? And why a photo of a caucasian male? Weird.

Drop This Fact

Recent research has indicated that its not the waist-hip ratio that men look for in women, as previously thought, but rather the waist-stature ratio.