Humans can 'whiff' out the person's gender

Human beings can apparently 'smell' out the gender of a person.

According to researchers, the whiffs of the active steroid ingredients (androstadienone in males and estratetraenol in females) influence our perceptions of movement as being either more masculine or more feminine and the effect, which occurs completely without awareness, depends on both our biological sex and our sexual orientations.

Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that the findings show that the nose can sniff out gender from body secretions even when we don't think we smell anything on the conscious level.

The results provide the first direct evidence that the two human steroids communicate opposite gender information that is differentially effective to the two sex groups based on their sexual orientation.

The findings have been published in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.