Beauty and The Beastly Reality of The Labour Market Hidni

and Syabil

Ever wondered why you did not get a job offer, were rejected from scholarships, and got low marks in a public speaking competition? Though there are a lot of factors that could affect the outcome, your physical attractiveness might be one of the factors too.

This is known as “pretty privilege”. Pretty privilege works on the principle that people who are deemed more attractive—based on accepted societal beauty standards—have an upper hand in the world and are afforded many opportunities that regular folks don't have. Although we always say that “beauty is subjective”, there is an undeniable consensus on who is considered beautiful or otherwise. Evidently, no sane person has ever – sincerely and wholeheartedly – called Zendaya “ugly”. One’s beauty not only reflects attractiveness but also internal values. In other words, a person’s beauty is likely to boost their perceived values in other aspects such as intelligence, friendliness, punctuality, etc. This tendency is known as the “halo effect”, which may happen consciously (through stereotypes) or unconsciously in our life.

With the courtesy of the halo effect, your attractiveness may positively influence your chance of being employed. This is likely due to your employer making positive assumptions about your work efficiency and work ethic based on the most obvious trait you have: your beauty. This is the same principle with food; we always think that food with good presentation must be good in taste too despite those two having no relationship at all.

A particularly effective research approach for documenting the advantage of attractive people in the job application and interview process involves sending CVs with photos of attractive and unattractive men and women to firms that have advertised job openings. In one recent study using this approach, Busetta and collaborators sent 11,008 CVs to 1,542 job openings in Italy. They sent the same CV 8 times to each job opening: in 4 cases they included a photograph of the alleged applicant (as an attractive man, an unattractive man, an attractive woman, or an unattractive woman), whereas in the other 4 cases no photo was included. Callback rates were significantly higher for attractive women and men when compared to unattractive women and men (attractive women: 54%; unattractive women: 7%; attractive men: 47%; unattractive men: 26%) and applicants without photos (39%).

Overall, callback rates did not differ significantly for female and male applicants, indicating the absence of sex discrimination in the hiring process. However, there was a robust main effect of attractiveness, as well as a significant interaction between attractiveness and sex, as attractiveness mattered more for female applicants (54% vs 7%) than for males (47% vs 26%).

An additional explanation for why attractive adults are favored is because they are preferred sexual partners. Consistent with evolutionary explanations, biases in favor of attractive women appear to be more consistent or stronger than those in favor of attractive men (women tend to be more selective in mating), and biases are more consistently reported in interactions between opposite-sex than same-sex individuals. A daily example of this was shown by a Chicago-based beauty Anjola Fagbemi. She claims that she scored drinks, Uber rides, surf lessons, and $500 tickets to Lollapalooza all free of charge, for no other reason than the fact that she is stunning. Fagbemi says the people who gave her the gifts weren’t expecting anything in return and were simply excited to be in her company. Hence explaining that pretty privilege may also include pure altruism.

Nevertheless, the status quo is not always met. Evidently, pretty privilege is the result of society’s preferences and prejudices, which is what actually leads to situations that may harm these ‘pretty’ people. We now understand that society generally holds positive stereotypes of physically attractive people and because of those stereotypes, these people are more favoured by the public. However, when we perceive these people to have greater entitlement than less attractive individuals, it can in fact negatively impact them in the working sector.

Imagine Regina George from Mean Girls as a mechanical engineer. If she was bad at the job, people would scoff with satisfaction, claiming that she didn’t belong in such a sector anyways. If she was good at it, the praises and achievements she received would indirectly be associated with her perceived attractiveness instead of merit. Many findings validate the ‘dumb-blonde’ assumption— the preposition that people blatantly assume that beautiful women are stupid. Some managers will find themselves thinking twice about hiring women that are too attractive, worrying over their capabilities. Ironically enough, extraordinarily good-looking men weren’t found to be discriminated against at all!

Although beauty can help someone in search of a job, it is not entirely true. In the study by Anderson and Nida (1978), highly attractive people of the same sex are judged as less talented than average looking-people. If an employer of the same sex is making a hiring decision, they may let their jealousy get the better of them, as they perceive them as a threat. In the workplace, attractive people can experience social rejection from members of their own sex despite being more socially popular. These employees will eventually disassociate themselves, feeling that their contributions are not valued. This leads to lower performance, they would engage less with their job, and could potentially push them to quit, reducing the organisation’s overall profit.

There will always be two sides to a coin, and there should always be an effort in finding the middle ground. Perceiving and assuming another person’s entitlement could impact their lives negatively, which would eventually disadvantage society as a whole, productivity-wise. Modern solutions like blind recruitment are an amazing step towards progression, but the main element that requires change is our mentality. If we are able to view others consciously, without any selective bias whatsoever, the nation can definitely move forward and develop for the better.