Ladies, if you want a man at your feet, wear high heels.

Research shows that men are more likely to help a woman wearing heels than one in flats.

This assistance ranges from taking part in a survey, to chasing after a woman who has dropped a glove.

French researcher Nicholas Guéguen said: ‘Women’s shoe heel size exerts a powerful influence on men’s behaviour.’

Professor Guéguen first showed that men were much more likely to agree to fill in a questionnaire when stopped in the street by a woman in heels. And the higher the heels, the more willing they were.

When the women doing the survey were in flats, just 25 of the 60 men took part.

A two-inch heel made them more amenable, with 36 out of the 60 that were approached agreeing to answer the woman’s questions.

But when the heels rose to almost four inches, the number of male volunteers rose to 49 out of 60, or as Professor Guéguen put it: ‘Men responded more favourably to the survey request as soon as the length of her heels increased.’

Tellingly, heel height had no effect on women’s odds of agreeing to do the survey.

In another experiment, men were almost twice as likely to return a glove to a woman if she was in high heels.

Some 56 out of 60 men stopped or chased down a female who dropped a glove while walking ahead of them in four-inch heels.

The professor, from the University of South Brittany, said that men may see offering help as a non-threatening way of making contact with an attractive female.

His final experiment involved watching how long it took men standing drinking in a bar to approach a woman sitting alone at a nearby table.

A woman in high heels was chatted up almost twice as quickly as one in sensible shoes, the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior reports.

Professor Guéguen isn’t sure why heels make a woman more attractive but he says that it may be by that changes in gait and posture make her seem more feminine.

However, a previous British study found that a man can’t tell from a woman’s walk whether she is wearing heels.

In any case, the women in the bar were sitting down.

Another possibility is that that the use of high heels in sexy films and adverts has led to men near-automatically associating them with desirability.