Talk amongst yourselves....

Are Attractive People More Employable?

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount Pictures

Are good-looking people more likely to get jobs? That depends whether you’re talking about men or women, according to a new working paper. From the abstract:

Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5,312 CVs in pairs to 2,656 advertised job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female.Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations and provide evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason for the punishment of attractive women.

Previous research, however, has found that good-looking female workers receive higher raises than their plain or ugly counterparts.