Is Gaydar Real? Absolutely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-gaydar.html?ref=opinion

The Science of Gaydar" by Joshua Tabak and Vivian Zayas, presents the theory that gaydar is in fact, real.  Citing an experiment in which participants judged sexual orientation solely on facial features, the results were 60% accurate.  That's not a whole lot more than a 50/50 guess, but it is enough to be statistically significant.  The hairstyles, piercings, clothing were all removed so that the only thing participants had to go off of was facial features.  The photos were only presented for a grand total of 50 milliseconds, a brief glance, making intense scrutiny impossible.  Yet the participants "gaydar" was more than fifty percent accurate.  Based on the findings, it is suggested that we use configural face processing (ratio of facial features' postitioning to one another and width/height ratio) rather than featural face processing (the examination of a single feature such as eyes).  So a a more masculine trait like a wider face, or larger width/height ratio, would tip off gaydar for a woman, while an effeminate, smaller ratio would designate a man as gay.  But, the findings were consistently more accurate when judging women's faces (64%) than men's (57%).  This was the cause of "false alarms", the tendency to guess more men were gay than actually were. The article suggests this may be because the perception of gender roles: a boy playing with barbies is more likely to be gay, while a girl playing sports is not any more likely to be.  Gender roles for men are much stricter, making any effeminate feature a red flag.

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I picked this article because I thought it would be interesting, and I am interested in the psychology involved in the differences in sexual orientation between men and women.  It was humorously written, and went into detail as to what this might suggest for discrimination in the workforce against the LBGT community, that a "Don't ASk Don't Tell" policy would be ineffective because we can make those judgements for ourselves with reasonable accuracy.  I enjoyed that the author made a distinction between "ability" and "proficiency", reminding the reader that 60% accuracy is still fairly low in the grand scheme of things.