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Beauty may have a price when job-searching
Last Updated: 2003-01-14 10:00:31 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Alison McCook
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New findings suggest that women who are physically attractive may find the cards stacked against them when applying for jobs in which appearance plays little or no role.
These findings contradict an oft-seen trend in research known as the beauty bias, in which physically attractive men and women appear to enjoy advantages in society that their less attractive peers lack.
Kenneth Podratz of Rice University in Houston, Texas, discovered that, when asked to rate people's suitability for different jobs based solely on their photographs, students reported that attractive women were less suited than unattractive women for jobs in which appearance is unimportant. Such jobs included photo lab assistants and switchboard operators.
In contrast, Podratz discovered that attractive men still held an advantage over unattractive men in terms of their suitability for the same types of jobs.
And when faced with jobs considered more masculine--such as prison guard and car salesperson--female participants indicated they believed that unattractive women were more or equally suited for the task than their beautiful peers, but male students did not share that opinion. Again, handsome male applicants beat out the less attractive competition.
The findings are based on the opinions of 66 undergraduate students regarding the suitability of 204 people for 33 jobs. The students based their decision on a photograph of each applicant.
In an interview with Reuters Health, Podratz cautioned that these results may not apply to real-life situations. Participants rated a person's suitability based solely on their photographs, and without a resume or other information that an actual employer would use to make a hiring decision.
The current experiment "was somewhat removed from an actual situation," Podratz noted.
That said, the researcher suggested that people may opt for less attractive female employees for a number of reasons. For instance, people may prefer unattractive applicants as a result of the negative stereotype that beautiful women are not smart. However, Podratz noted that attractive women were more likely to be rated as suitable for high status jobs such as management positions, which appears to contradict that stereotype.
He added that students may have felt that attractive females were also less physically strong than other women, or less willing to perform undesirable work. The exact reasons for the students' preferences for unattractive women over others for certain jobs remains unclear, Podratz said.
But for jobs where appearance becomes important, all of these negative associations with beauty may become less important, he added. "When physical appearance is seen as important, however, I think any such negative effects--ie, those favoring the unattractive--are overpowered by a general bias in favor of the attractive," Podratz said.
Podratz noted that the scenario in which attractive women were least likely to out-compete their peers was in "hyper-masculine" jobs that also place little importance on appearance, such as a prison guard or tow-truck driver.
In this scenario, "I think you would be most likely to find a physically attractive female would be at a disadvantage," he said.
Podratz, who has yet to publish his findings, said he would like to continue his research, for example by testing his results in a more realistic setting using people instead of photographs. But he admits there are certain problems with that type of experiment.
For instance, Podratz said he hesitates to recruit people to participate in the research, such as by asking them "'hey, would you help me out with my study because you're unattractive?'" he explained.
"I really don't want to do that, for a lot of reasons," Podratz noted.
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