Good Looks Can Help You Get Hired–Most of the Time

Since the 1970s, research on how people rate attractive and less attractive job candidates has suggested that most of the time, people considering pictures of job applicants are biased in favor of attractive people.  A few studies over the years have suggested that for women, attractiveness could sometimes actually be a disadvantage.

The truth, it turns out, is pretty complicated, as a new study shows.  For women, how much their attractiveness matters depends on the kind of job they are applying for.  That might not seem like much of a surprise–of course it would be more important for a fashion model to be attractive than a librarian.

The big difference comes when women apply to traditionally male jobs.  Even here, in traditionally male jobs in which appearance is thought to be important (like car sales), good looks don’t become a disadvantage.  But when attractive women apply for traditionally male jobs in which people generally don’t think attractiveness is an asset, their attractiveness actually becomes a disadvantage.

The researchers, led by Dr. Stefanie Johnson of the University of Colorado, Denver, hypothesize that in this narrow category (traditionally male jobs in which looks are thought to be unimportant), good-looking women just don’t seem like a good fit for the job.  They published their results in the most recent issue of the Journal of Social Psychology.

The authors of the study also noted that certain aspects of their research differed from earlier findings related to women’s attractiveness as a factor in hiring–specifically, to a group of studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s that found good looks to be a disadvantage in a broader spectrum of jobs.  The researchers speculate that the reason may be that there is less discrimination against women as job applicants across the board now than there was in the 1970s and 1980s.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), the strong bias in favor of attractive people does not seem to have changed since the 1970s.  If anything, this result is more consistent in the current research than in earlier studies.  Male or female, attractiveness makes you seem like a better job prospect–unless you happen to be a gorgeous woman who wants to be a tow truck driver.