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http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/food/Faces.jpg

PROBLEM: Clothing, make-up, and physical reaction to the phrase 
"universal healthcare" aside, can you determine someone's 
political affiliation just by looking at their face? (Answers 
are below, if you want to play along.)

METHODOLOGY: Researchers at UCLA used a sophisticated computer 
program -- the "FaceGen Modeler"-- to evaluate the features of 
the 434 members of the 111th House of Representatives against 
the typical facial characteristics of their gender. They then 
showed the photos to 120 undergrads and had them guess each 
representative's political affiliation.

RESULTS: Republican congresswomen had the most sex-typical 
faces. When the subtle dimensions of their features were taken 
as a whole, they were rated twice as typically feminine as their 
Democratic cohorts. The correlation between femininity and party 
alignment was directly related to their voting records: the more 
conservatively they voted, the more sex-typical their face.

Men's faces, on the other hand, were less likely overall to be 
sex-typical, although male Republicans did tend to have less 
masculine faces than male Democrats.They were 98 percent more 
likely to correctly identify women as Republicans when those 
women had more typically feminine faces.

The undergrads were able to correctly identify the party 
affiliation of both men and women at rates significantly higher 
than chance. As the women's faces became more feminine, the odds 
of the undergrads correctly identifying them as Republicans 
increased as well. On the flip side, they were 58 percent less 
likely to correctly identify more feminine-looking women as 
Democrats.

CONCLUSION: Republican congresswomen have more feminine faces 
than Democrats, a phenomenon that observers are able to 
recognize.

IMPLICATIONS: The researchers see an easy connection between the 
Republican women's objective femininity and their party's 
obsession with traditional sex roles. That the correlation 
wasn't seen in men allows them to expand on the role of gender 
in politics: political leadership, they suggest, "is a 
historically masculine endeavor, thus automatically conferring 
masculine characteristics on male politicians." In other words, 
male Republicans don't need to look masculine in the way that 
female Republicans need to look feminine.

In a statement, author Kerri Johnson pointed to research 
suggesting that people tend to think of competency and 
femininity as being mutually exclusive in women. "We suspect 
that conservative constituents demand that their politicians be 
not just competent but also gender-typical, especially among 
women," she said -- putting the ladies of the GOP in an 
unfortunate double-bind.

The full study, "Appearance-based politics: Sex-typed facial 
cues communicate political party affiliation," will be published 
in The Journal of Experimental Psychology .

The most and least typically feminine faces pictured above 
belong to (clockwise from top left): Michele Bachmann (R), Kay 
Granger(R), Rosa DeLauro (D), Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D), 
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R), Anna G. Eshoo (D).

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/study-
republican-congresswomen-look-twice-as-feminine-as-
democrats/262973/

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