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In companies that advertised job openings, good-looking females (as judged by a panel we assembled) received 6% fewer callbacks than plain-looking females and 23% fewer than women without pictures. The beauty "penalty" was much smaller and less significant when it came to employment agencies, perhaps because the women screening CVs wouldn't have had to work side-by-side with the candidates.
In both the hiring companies and the agencies, screeners reacted favorably to pictures of attractive-looking men, giving these candidates significantly more callbacks than plain-looking men and males who didn't attach photos. This male beauty premium did not come as a surprise in light of the large body of psychological research showing that attractive people are generally viewed positively along numerous dimensions. They're believed to be happier, healthier, more intelligent, luckier in marriage, and so on. Thus the responses to the CV photos of attractive women really stand out and tell us a lot about the screeners' biases.
Moss Norman of Concordia University in Canada looked at how teen boys perceived their bodies in light of what media outlets, their male peers and the opposite sex deemed masculine. After conducting interviews, observations and focus groups, Norman concludes that boys possess a "double-bind masculinity," in which they care about their appearance, but not in ways that make them look vain or uncool. The idea isn't new, but researchers are curious to see when this outlook takes root in males. So far, it could begin in early adolescence or even during childhood.
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double-bind thinking is common in boys between the ages of 13 and 15. Participants, from two white and black communities in Canada, note that it would "be nice" to have a muscular body similar to what's deemed desirable through media, but it's not a big deal if they don't have it.
Unlike girls and women, boys and men are pulled in two separate directions: being healthy, attractive and masculine, and the need to transcend their bodies for a more rational, functional outlook in life. True, women can feel tugged by conflicting responsibilities and body image issues, too, but they aren't generally looked down upon for caring about their appearance -- something that seems to be the case among boys and men. In some instances, participants describe such "vanity" as limited to the realm of "girls" and "gay men," the author writes.
Instead, a sense of what they perceived as "normal" drove the teens' concepts of masculinity. Staying in shape was a personal responsibility, not necessarily an effort to look better. Boys not concerned with their appearance said they don't need to look good, but rather need to have "game," or the smooth skills, to draw interest from girls. Surprisingly, most boys didn't apply the same flexibility to girls their same age. An unattractive girl couldn't get attention from boys with social skills alone. In other words, her appearance had to back it up, which wasn't true for boys, in their opinion.
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the most thorough compendium of research I've seen about how good-looking people get more of everything. The book is Looks: Why They Matter More than You Ever Imagined, by Gordon Patzer, professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago and former dean at California State University.
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It is well-documented that good-looking people make more money than everyone else. Taller men make more money than shorter men. If a woman is just 13 pounds overweight, she is penalized at work. (Hat tip: Recruiting Animal.)
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The resumes of "attractive" males received a 19.9 percent response rate, nearly 50 percent higher than the13.7 percent response rate for "plain" males and more than twice the 9.2 percent response rate of no-picture males.
"It follows that an attractive male needs to send on average five CVs in order to obtain one response, whereas a plain-looking male needs to send 11 for a single response," explains Ze'ev Shtudiner, co-researcher and Ph.D. candidate. However, among women, the BGU study indicates that, contrary to popular belief, "attractive" women are called back for a position LESS often than "plain women" (unattractive), as well as women who had no picture on their resume.
"Among female candidates, no-picture females have the highest response rate, 22 percent higher than plain females and 30 percent higher than attractive females.
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attractive and plain women alike are better off omitting their photograph from a resume since it decreases their chances of a callback by 20 to 30 percent
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