Even in the developed and liberal world, there are many biases at play in the workplace, which account for the unmeritocratic or unfair advantage that some groups have over others, irrespective of their actual talent or potential: sexism, racism, and ageism, to name just a few.
Yet one of the most pervasive and prominent biases is hardly ever acknowledged, namely the beauty bias – also known as “lookism”. The existence of a beauty premium in the labor market is well-documented. As comprehensive academic review summarized: “Physically attractive individuals are more likely to be interviewed for jobs and hired, they are more likely to advance rapidly in their careers through frequent promotions, and they earn higher wages than unattractive individuals”. Common manifestations of appearance-based discrimination may include bias against obese, oddly-dressed, or tattooed employees, or any individuals who don’t fit a society’s dominant aesthetic criteria.
Broadly speaking, the beauty bias concerns the favorable treatment that individuals receive when they are deemed more attractive, regardless of whether this happens consciously or unconsciously – and few individuals, let alone employers, actually admit to preferring to work with others on the basis of their higher levels of attractiveness. Naturally, there are exceptions. For instance, in order to join the Chinese Navy “good looks” are an official requirement, and though Abercrombie & Fitch had a $50-million settlement for hiring WASPY looking retail assistants, it was not banned from imposing attractiveness standards in its recruitment policies, so long as the attractive people it recruited were ethnically diverse.
Now the good news: the attractiveness bias is easy to spot, so any employer interested in eliminating handicaps against less attractive people cannot just detect this bias, but also evaluate the efficacy of interventions designed to mitigate it.
First, you measure attractiveness, which is typically a function of consensual ratings of physical appearance – multiple ratings of others’ attractiveness. Imagine you ask 10 people to rate 100 people on physical appearance. Although attractiveness is not objective, which is why there are always disagreements between people rating the same person, it is also not entirely subjective, so most people will tend to agree on whether someone is more or less attractive, for instance on a 1-10 point scale, and not just when they belong to the same culture.
Next, you can correlate this score with a range of success indicators, from interview ratings, to job performance ratings, as well as promotion and salary data. Given that attractiveness is rarely a formal criterion for picking one person over another – except, of course, in the dating world – there are obvious reasons for evaluating whether and why people’s attractiveness scores correlate with any objective indicator of career success. Here’s where the scientific evidence provides useful data.
A pro-attractiveness bias exists already in education, with studies showing that physically attractive students tend to obtain higher grades at university, partly because they are deemed more conscientious and intelligent, even when they are not. Furthermore, attractiveness already helps students to get into university in the first place, by eliciting more favorable evaluations during college admissions interviews. This is consistent with the broader finding of a very well-established “halo” effect whereby attractive people are generally perceived as being more sociable, healthy, successful, honest, and talented. In fact, meta-analytic studies suggest that even children are deemed smarter, more honest, and driven, when they are more attractive – and children make the same type of inferences when they evaluate more or less attractive adults. In a clever experiment, researchers asked kids to pick an imaginary boat captain for a game, and they were told to choose from photographs of actual politicians (unknown to the 5-year old kids). More often than not, they picked the more attractive candidate, and their choices predicted the results of past political elections with an accuracy of around 80%.
Unsurprisingly, the beauty bias transfers into the workplace, with scientific studies showing that less attractive individuals are more likely to get fired, even though they are also less likely to be hired in the first place. For example, in an experimental study, researchers sent 11,000 CVs to various job openings, including identical CVs accompanied by candidate photographs of different levels of attractiveness. Attractive women and men were much more likely to get a call back for an interview than unattractive (or no-photograph) candidates were. Given these findings, one wonders how many countries – in particular Germany – request that job applicants include a picture in their resumes.
Scientific studies also highlight a well-established association between attractiveness and long-term income, with above-average beauty translating into 10% to 15% higher salaries than below-average beauty. In the U.S., this beauty premium is similar to the one found for race or gender. Note that this effect is found even among highly successful individuals. For instance, attractiveness ratings of Fortune 500 executives predicted their companies’ profits.
As the cliché phrase notes, correlation does not mean causation, but it is also true that correlations tend to have causes. One delicate issue is the possibility – supported by evolutionary psychology research – that the cause of the correlation between beauty and career success is not (only) prejudice or bias, but (also) actual talent. In other words, could it be that, at least in part, attractive people do better in life because they actually possess more adaptive traits, such as intelligence or talent? While this notion may seem distasteful, there is no evidence that those individuals who are shocked or appalled by it fail to be influenced by other peoples’ physical appearance, or fall prey of lookism-related stereotypes.
To be sure, this proposition is hard to test, not least because of the common absence of objective performance data that is not conflated with subjective preference. Consider that most peoples’ performance is measured simply by a single subjective rating provided by their direct line manager or boss. If employers lack objective data to distill managers’ bias and subjective preferences from their ratings of their employees’ performance, how can they quantify an employees’ exact contribution to the firm?
By the same token, it’s not always easy to determine whether appearance should be treated as a bias factor or job-relevant trait, especially when employees’ performance depends on the perceptions customers or clients have of them. As a Glassdoor report noted, “there are many industries and businesses that would suffer immeasurably if we were to legislate out beauty bias.” In support of this idea, evolutionary scientists report positive correlations between attractiveness ratings on one hand, and actual scores on socially desirable personality traits, such as emotional stability, extraversion, and ambition on the other. For example, physical attractiveness – just like psychological attractiveness (EQ or likability) – contributes to better sales and fund raising potential, so is it sensible to stop employers from hiring more attractive salespeople or fundraisers?
Perhaps, because the alternative is to discriminate against less attractive individuals, which will include people from minority groups who don’t fit the dominant “beauty norms”. But when employers simply pretend to ignore attractiveness, focusing on candidates’ past performance or interview performance, and interpreting these data as objective or “bias-free”, there is no guarantee that less attractive candidates won’t be handicapped. It is no different from pretending to ignore race or social class, while selecting candidates on academic credentials, which are actually conflated with race and social class.
Clearly, then, there’s an unfair advantage to being deemed more attractive, and an unfair handicap to being deemed less attractive. Although employers can mitigate this bias by eliminating appearance data from their hiring practices – for instance by focusing on science-based assessments, past performance, and resume data, instead of face-to-face interviews – such measures will not be sufficient to eliminate bias, since even seemingly objective data is likely to have been influenced by historical biases: for example, if attractive people have been evaluated more favorably in the past, they will show up as high performers in their CVs, and so on.
In short, it’s a challenging task to eliminate the beauty bias from work and make attractiveness a less significant driver of peoples’ career success. But one thing is clear: we will never manage to achieve this by avoiding the subject or pretending that the bias doesn’t exist.