Sex differences and the own-gender bias in face recognition: A meta-analytic review

Abstract

We review the literature on sex differences and the own-gender bias in face recognition. By means of a meta-analysis, we found that girls and women remember more faces than boys and men do (g=0.36), and more female faces (g=0.55), but not more male faces (g=0.08); however, when only male faces are presented, girls and women outperform boys and men (g=0.22). In addition, there is female own-gender bias (g=0.57), but not a male own-gender bias (g= − 0.03), showing that girls and women remember more female than male faces. It is argued that girls and women have an advantage in face processing and episodic memory, resulting in sex differences for faces, and that the female own-gender bias may stem from an early perceptual expertise for female faces, which may be strengthened by reciprocal interactions and psychological processes directing girls' and women's interest to other females.

Keywords:

• Face recognition
• Own-gender bias
• Sex differences

This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research awarded to AH. The authors wish to thank Joshua Juvrud for assistance in the editing process and Jenny Rehnman for earlier work contributing to the ideas put forward in this paper.

This research was supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research awarded to AH. The authors wish to thank Joshua Juvrud for assistance in the editing process and Jenny Rehnman for earlier work contributing to the ideas put forward in this paper.

Notes

¹ The own-gender bias is a within-subjects effect, and therefore the correlation between recognition of female and male faces is required to estimate the effect size when only means and standard deviations are reported (e.g., Borenstein, 2009). To estimate the association between recognition of female and male faces, we performed an additional random-effects meta-analysis on 18 Pearson product–moment correlations from seven studies (see Appendix). There was no sex difference in the magnitude of the combined correlations (p = .50), and therefore this measure was computed across females and males. The combined correlation across these studies was r = .47 (95% CI=[.36, .57]). This correlation was used to estimate Hedges's g for studies only reporting M and SD for recognition of female and male faces.