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Physical attractiveness is always associated with mating success; however research has already shown that it also correlates to women’s capability of having kids and men’s semen quality. A recent research has focused on analyzing the number of kids born based on the physical attractiveness of the participants and has interesting results.

Many studies have shown increased mating success with increased physical attractiveness, however this cannot lead to a conclusion that higher physical attractiveness would result in more number of kids. For example, several researchers have shown that when people seek partners to have kids, they do not prefer extremely attractive partners; as such partners are more likely to leave them or have extra marital affairs. This factor shows that, it is not necessary that increased attractiveness leads to more number of kids.

Yearbook photos, fertility and marital history data of 2241 (1244 women and 997 men) people aged 53 to 56 years were collected. Thirty three judges from ages 63 to 97 rated all of the yearbook photos (each picture gets rated 6 times) for their attractiveness, based on face. Upon this ranking, the participants were grouped as not attractive, moderately attractive, attractive and very attractive. The association between attractiveness and years of marriage, parental socioeconomic status & education level was estimated using regression analysis to provide for the necessary adjustment, these factors would contribute to the number of kids. Following which, detailed statistical analysis was performed to study the relationship between the age at which the participants had their first kid, interbirth interval etc and the physical attractiveness.