Data from: The morphometrics of “masculinity” in human faces

In studies of social inference and human mate preference, a wide but
inconsistent array of tools for computing facial masculinity has been
devised. Several of these approaches implicitly assumed that the
individual expression of sexually dimorphic shape features, which we refer
to as maleness, resembles facial shape features perceived as masculine. We
outline a morphometric strategy for estimating separately the face shape
patterns that underlie perceived masculinity and maleness, and for
computing individual scores for these shape patterns. We further show how
faces with different degrees of masculinity or maleness can be constructed
in a geometric morphometric framework. In an application of these methods
to a set of human facial photographs, we found that shape features
typically perceived as masculine are wide faces with a wide inter-orbital
distance, a wide nose, thin lips, and a large and massive lower face. The
individual expressions of this combination of shape features—the
masculinity shape scores—were the best predictor of rated masculinity
among the compared methods (r = 0.5). The shape features perceived as
masculine only partly resembled the average face shape difference between
males and females (sexual dimorphism). Discriminant functions and
Procrustes distances to the female mean shape were poor predictors of
perceived masculinity.