If you always had the niggling feeling that there are more good-looking girls than guys around, there's a study to back you up on that.

The Daily Mail reported that Dr Satoshi Kanazawa, of the London School of Economics, conducted a study that may just provide evidence that beautiful women are more likely to have girls than their plainer-looking counterparts.

He analysed data from a survey that involved 17,000 babies born in Britain in March 1958 and tracked them throughout their lives.

Their attractiveness was rated by their teachers when the babies reached seven years of age.

When they reached 45, they were asked about the gender of any children they had.

Journal Sciences reported that those rated as attractive were equally likely to have a son or daughter as their first child – but the less attractive ones were more likely to have a son.

Dr Kanazawa believes that parents tend to produce children who benefit from their own attributes, and beauty is a trait that benefits women more so than men. This means that it pays for attractive women to have daughters.

Another study, done earlier on 2,000 Americans, also suggested that women are becoming more beautiful over the generations, as attractive women have more children then plain Janes. As a result,  a higher proportion of their children are girls.

Meanwhile, couples who are blessed with strength and aggression instead of looks do better when having boys, as these characteristics are of more use to males.

Not everybody subscribes to the doctor's theory though.

Andrew Geltman, a statistician at Columbia University in the U.S., analysed People magazine’s annual 50 most beautiful people lists for 1995 to 2000.

The celebrities that were featured in these lists were slightly more likely to have sons that daughters, leading to a conclusion that is the opposite of Dr Kanazawa’s.

This is not the first time that Dr Kanazawa has come up with a controversial theory.

Another of his studies made headlines earlier this year when it found that men who cheat on their partners are more likely to have lower intelligence.