Do women have better gaydar than men?

It turns out that college students can spontaneously gauge a complete stranger's sexual orientation with startling accuracy, according to a new study from the University of Washington. What's more: It appears that women possess much stronger "gaydar" than their male peers. Here, a brief guide to the research: How did researchers assess a person's gaydar? University of Washington psychologists, led by graduate student Joshua Tabak, lined up 96 black-and-white photos of gay and straight subjects' faces, removing signifiers like hair, glasses, makeup, piercings, or anything else that might provide "easy clues" to a person's orientation, says Science Codex. Researchers then asked 129 test subjects to assess a person's sexual preference after briefly flashing his or her portrait for 50 milliseconds (three times faster than the blink of an eye) onscreen.    What did they find? Men and women alike were able to correctly gauge whether a person was gay or straight well above the 50-50 probability of random guessing. Women were able to correctly guess a stranger's orientation 65 percent of the time. Males, on the other hand, had a harder time, differentiating at 57 percent. When the faces were flipped upside down, women still guessed surprisingly well, at 61 percent; males' accuracy slipped to 53 percent. Why upside down? "Looking at faces upside down is known to mess up people's processing of how faces fit together," says Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience. A popular illusion called the Thatcher effect makes it tough to tell when the eyes or mouth are flipped around in an upside-down face. Researchers assumed this technique would throw people's gaydar off, delivering more accurate findings. But even with portraits flipped, subjects were still remarkably good at "processing individual facial features." Was it easier to judge males or females? Testers found that, for the most part, people were better at judging the correct orientation of women. "It's really interesting to speculate that there might be this ironic effect that because we're more familiar with the concept of gay men [in the media], maybe we're more liberal with labeling a man gay," says Tabak. Does everyone have a natural gaydar, then? There are "always a small number of people with no ability to distinguish gay and straight faces," Talbak tells the Telegraph. It could be that "people from older generations or cultures where homosexuality is not openly recognized" might not have a framework to work with, and are therefore less accurate with their assessments.