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)Women become better at identifying if a man is homosexual or heterosexual simply by looking at his face during ovulation, because their heightened desire to find a mate increases their accuracy.
Researchers from the University of Toronto asked 40 female students to look at pictures of 80 men's faces and to say whether they thought they were gay or straight.
Half of the photos belonged to straight men, while the other 40 were openly gay.
The pictures didn't differ in expression or attractiveness and women were encouraged solely to use their intuition when guessing a man's sexual orientation.
Results, published in journal Psychological Science, revealed that the closer women were to peak ovulation, the better they were at predicting whether a man was straight or gay. And researchers also found that women who were turned-on sexually were even better at identifying a gay man.
Scientists tested another 40 women, half of whom were asked to read a story about a 'romantic encounter' before being shown the face photos, the other half weren't.
Women 'primed with a mating goal' after reading hot and heavy fiction were found to be more accurate at identifying a man's sexual orientation than those who hadn't.
However, the ability to predict sexual orientation only worked with male faces - a similar experiment which saw 34 women shown 200 female faces, half of whom were gay, half straight - revealed no relationship between the fertility cycle and the accuracy of a woman's judgement.
Study author Professor Nicholas Rule, from the department of psychology at the University of Toronto said: "This study shows that a woman can more accurately identify a man's sexual orientation when looking at his face, when she is closest to her time of peak ovulation.
"Further, having romantic thoughts or a mating goal heightens a woman's ability to discriminate between straight and gay men.
"This effect is not apparent when a woman is judging another female's orientation.
"This suggests that fertility influences a heterosexual woman's attention to potential mates rather than merely increasing sensitivity to sexual orientation or nonverbal cues more generally."
He added: "Together, these findings suggest that women's accuracy may vary across the fertility cycle because men's sexual orientation is relevant to conception and thus of greater importance as women are nearer to ovulation."
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. I have great gaydar.
