ORIGINAL PAPER
Gender Differences for Specific Body Regions When
Looking at Men and Women
Johannes Hewig Æ Ralf H. Trippe Æ Holger Hecht Æ Thomas Straube Æ
Wolfgang H. R. Miltner
Published online: 7 March 2008

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract The goal of the present study was to provide first evidence for gender differ-
ences in gaze patterns while looking at the body of men and women. For this purpose
participants were exposed to 30 pictures of 15 male and 15 female models in casual
clothing. The individual scan paths were recorded using an eye-tracker. The results show
that both male and female observers primarily gaze at people’s face. Only after this initial
face-scan, men look significantly earlier and longer at women’s breasts, while women look
earlier at men’s legs. These observations uncover important aspects of the pattern of the
human gaze at others and particularly reveal important gender differences.
Keywords Eye tracking
Gaze
Picture viewing
Gender differences
Introduction
Previous research on human gaze patterns has focused on topics including individual
differences in gaze patterns during visual search (Miltner et al. 2004) and in participants
with psychopathology like autism (Klin et al. 2002) or on gaze patterns during gender
identification (Johnson and Tassinary 2005) and the mutual gaze during interactions of
men and women (e.g., Bailenson et al. 2003). Further studies have focused on general
questions like how faces are scanned (e.g., Williams et al. 2001) and how the scan path is
controlled (e.g., Henderson 2003; Henderson et al. 2003). One interesting aspect of human
gaze behavior has not yet been examined systematically in the past, i.e., how women look
at men’s bodies and men look at women’s bodies and how the gaze is distributed among
different body regions while scanning the body of the opposite sex. The question of where
do we look at when viewing other people was addressed by the present study using an eye-
tracking approach.
J. Hewig (&)
R. H. Trippe
H. Hecht
T. Straube
W. H. R. Miltner
Lehrstuhl fu¨r Biologische und Klinische Psychologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universita¨t Jena,
Am Steiger 3, Haus 1, 07743 Jena, Germany
e-mail: hewig@biopsy.uni-jena.de
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J Nonverbal Behav (2008) 32:67–78
DOI 10.1007/s10919-007-0043-5

Evolutionary psychology suggests that human mating strategies are the consequence of
reproductive advantages of certain strategies in the phylogenetic past (for an overview see
Buss 2004; Thornhill and Grammer 1999). Among such strategies is the assessment of the
health and fertility of a potential sex partner (Buss 2004). Recently, Thornhill and
Grammer (1999) reported on correlations between separate ratings of the physical
attractiveness of the face and the body of women indicating that both are valid indicators of
health, phenotypic, and genetic quality. Yet Zebrowitz and Rhodes (2004) note that facial
attractiveness alone seems to be reliably related to health only in the lower half of the
attractiveness distribution in males and females. These authors suggested that this finding
favors the bad genes hypothesis, which implies that low attractiveness signals poor genetic
fitness. Accordingly, bad genes may be detected and avoided through assessing attrac-
tiveness, which increases fitness.
In accordance with the evolutionary hypothesis, men’s mating strategies are further
supposed to include the assessment of a female’s waist to hip ratio with a ratio around 0.7
signaling optimal fertility. A recent study by Jasienska et al. (2004) further showed that
breast size represents another indicator of reproductive capacity in addition to the waist to
hip ratio. In line with this evidence, breast size and waist to hip ratio have been found to be
important for the assessment of the attractiveness of women by men (Singh 1993; Singh
and Young 1995). It has been shown that the waist to hip ratio is also an important
indicator of male attractiveness as assessed by females (Singh 1995). Generally, it may be
suggested that men and women focus their attention to those body regions that most likely
provide information about the suitability of another person as a mate. Taken together, the
importance of the breast region for the assessment of reproductive capacity by males may
provide an argument to hypothesize that men as compared to women show increased
attention to the breast region, whereas the waist and hip regions are an important source of
information for both sexes.
This is in line with the findings of a recent eye-tracking study by Johnson and Tassinary
(2005). In their study, participants were requested to assess the sex of walking artificial
human figures. The results show, that both for men and women, the waist and hip were the
main focus of participants’ attention. In addition and as compared to females, male
observers showed increased attention to the chest region and spent somewhat less attention
to the waist and hip region, which was still the main focus of attention for males as well.
However, this gaze pattern might primarily reflect that the participants had to decide on the
sex of the ambiguous figures rather than natural gaze behavior toward others. Furthermore,
artificial and ambiguous human figures are different from pictures of real men and women.
Thus, the study provides interesting but only indirect evidence on how men and women
scan each other’s body. In another very recent study, Lykins et al. (2006) examined the
effect of eroticism of the pictures they presented. They reported on differences between the
responses of men and women to erotic versus non-erotic pictures. However, the females
only watched male pictures and vice versa and thus any conclusion about gender differ-
ences is rather speculative.
Several lines of research suggest that faces are of particular importance for human
interactions (e.g., Aharon et al. 2001; Ekman 1999, 2003; Ekman and Oster1979; Fischer
et al. 2004; Fridlund 1991; Hall et al. 2005;O
¨
hman 1993). Furthermore, the human brain
was demonstrated being highly specialized for facial information (e.g., Haxby et al. 2001;
Haxby et al. 2002; Hoffman and Haxby 2000; Schweinberger et al. 2002, 2004). Very
early in life, human infants start to fixate faces and respond to different facial expressions
(see Johnson et al. 1991; Morton and Johnson 1991). Among the reasons for the salience of
faces is the fact that faces convey important information not only about the identity,
68 J Nonverbal Behav (2008) 32:67–78
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