Ten years ago, former TV news anchor Christine Craft sued a Kansas City station that demoted her for being “too ugly,” a highly publicized and ultimately unsuccessful case that added “lookism” to the growing list of prejudices condemned by social critics.
Now the first major study on the subject by economists shows that “lookism” carries a big price for its victims and handsome economic rewards for those blessed with good looks.
The earnings gap between attractive and unattractive people, who otherwise share the same education, experience and other characteristics, rivals that between black and white or male and female workers, report Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle, economists at the University of Texas at Austin and Michigan State University in East Lansing.
In a surprising departure from conventional wisdom, their research suggests that men earn even greater rewards for good looks and pay even greater penalties for ugliness than do women in our beauty-conscious society.
“The biggest effects are on the bad-looking, not the good-looking,” said Hamermesh, who said he’s startled by the finding that men are penalized more.
Attractive people tend to earn about 5 percent more than those with average looks. Homely workers pull in about 7 percent less than average, other things being equal, the researchers found. Men with below-average looks suffered a 9 percent earnings penalty, compared with 5 percent for women.
The researchers also found that women considered to be unattractive are less likely to work than other women and tend to marry men with lower levels of education.
These earnings gaps could be explained by a variety of factors: employers showing simple favoritism toward attractive job applicants, a tendency by consumers or fellow employees to favor good-looking workers (thus making them more valuable to bosses) or the possibility that attractive workers have higher self-esteem and actually produce more.
Psychologists have found that attractive people are widely regarded as being more intelligent, friendly, honest and confident, all traits that could influence employers and customers to discriminate in favor of them.
And attractive children are often rewarded with more praise from parents and teachers, shaping their personality in ways that may boost their confidence and poise.
The economists found some evidence that the earnings gap is caused by certain occupations catering to attractive employees more than others. But favoritism toward good looks and prejudice against homeliness is pervasive in most jobs, they determined.
“It’s not just a matter of good-looking people going to work in Hollywood and bad-looking people digging ditches,” Hamermesh said. “Even within any given occupation, good-looking people make more.”
Hamermesh and Biddle based their study on three household and worker surveys from the United States and Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, which rated respondents on a five-point scale for physical appearance.
One previous study by three University of Pittsburgh researchers, although much more limited in scope, supports their findings. It used a panel to rate the attractiveness of 700 M.B.A. graduates from their 1973 yearbooks, then compared those ratings with their 1983 incomes. The spread for men, based on looks, was as much as $10,000. That study also suggested that men were rewarded in the workplace more for looks than women were.