According to a recent study, high heels make women perceive themselves as sexier, more feminine and of higher status, but heels did not change perceived personality or intelligence.
The study analyzed the responses of 448 participants who answered questions about attractiveness and other developmental fitness-related traits, and short- and long-term mating potential, of a woman wearing flat or high-heeled shoes.
Handicap theory
It was hypothesized that women in high heels would be rated as more attractive and evolutionarily fit by both men and women, and preferred by men for short-term mating. The hypothesis was partially supported in the present study..
The woman with high heels was perceived as more sexually attractive, physically attractive, feminine, and of higher status. Additionally, women rated women as having higher status regardless of shoe than men, while men rated women as having greater short- and long-term mating potential than women, regardless of shoe.
Wearing high heels, then, reinforces the call handicap principle, because women pay a high price to wear them: like most beads or braces to attract attention, they are harmful to health.
The handicap principle is a hypothesis originally proposed in 1975 by the biologist Amotz Zahavi to explain how evolution can cause signals of good intentions to occur between animals that have an obvious motivation to deceive the other or to deceive each other, and suggests that these signals must come at a cost to the bearer, since such signals consist of some characteristic that cannot be coped with by other individuals. The male equivalent of high heels would be, for example, a cock car: