“We found that conservatives and liberals read dominance signals differently in the faces of men and women,” says Pankaj Aggarwal, professor of marketing in the department of management at U of T Scarborough.

“This has some practical implications for politics, gender stereotyping and how we perceive leadership roles in society.”

Aggarwal and co-author Ahreum Maeng, an associate professor at the University of Kansas, looked at the width-to-height-ratio of a face to measure perceptions of dominance. Basically, a person with a wider face is perceived as having a more dominant personality and possessing stronger leadership traits than someone with a narrower face.

In a series of experiments, the researchers found that wider faces in men are perceived as more dominant, but the same perception is less likely for women’s faces.