Women's Walk Researched: Most Hip Swinging Goes On When Women Are Least Fertile

The sway of a woman’s hips is not intended to impress men. That is what researchers say, who discovered that women have the sexiest walk during the part of the monthly cycle when they are least fertile.

Meghan Provost at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues dressed female volunteers in suits adorned with light markers placed along the joints and limbs. This allowed them to film each woman as she walked and then analyse her gait. The research found that there’s a correlation between the way the women walked and their time of the month. The women who were fertile walked with smaller hip movements and with their knees closer together. Provost’s team also collected saliva samples to find out whether each woman was in the more or less fertile phase of her menstrual cycle. Apparently, women unwittingly use a variety of signals to advertise their fertility to men, including some to advertise when they are ovulating and others to conceal the fact. Perhaps the most poignant part of the research is that when 40 men were shown the images of the women walking, they also rated those in the less fertile part of their cycle as having the sexiest walks. “This was so surprising, I replicated the study with two more independent groups of men to make sure,” says Provost, who will publish the results in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The results appear to run counter to other recent research, which has shown men responding more markedly towards women at ovulation. For example, research published in the New Scientist last month, pointed out that US lap dancers earn more tips in their fertile period. But Provost claims this is only a superficial contradiction because her team was investigating different kinds of signals compared to previous research. The other research had been investigating men’s response to fertile women focused on signals such as smells and facial expressions, which can only be detected at close range. That makes evolutionary sense, as it would benefit a woman to advertise her fertility to a man that she has decided is worth having children with and has therefore allowed to get close to her. In contrast, men can pick up on the attractiveness of a woman’s walk from long distance, and it can therefore act as an unwitting signal to less appealing males who she might not want to choose. So the advantage of having a less sexy walk around the time of ovulation becomes clear: it allows a woman to hide her fertile period from undesirable men who might take advantage of her at that time. “If women are trying to protect themselves from sexual assault at times of peak fertility, it would make sense for them to advertise attractiveness on a broad scale when they are not fertile,” says Provost, who now works at Mount Saint Vincent University in Nova Scotia, Canada. To signal their fertility to people they choose to be with, it makes sense for women to use other means, she says. “More and more research is being published indicating that ovulation perhaps should be considered unadvertised instead of concealed,” she says.