Are Good-Looking People More Employable?

Are Good-Looking People More Employable?

Bradley J. Ruffle Ben-Gurion University

Ze'ev Shtudiner Ariel University Center

November 2010

Abstract: Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of themselves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job openings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations and provide evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason for the punishment of attractive women.

Keywords: beauty, discrimination, experimental economics.

JEL classification nos.: C93, J71.

Corresponding Author: Bradley Ruffle, Department of Economics, Ben-Gurion University, Beer Sheva, Israel, 84105, e-mail: bradley@bgu.ac.il, tel.: +972-8-6472308, fax: +972-8-6472941.

Acknowledgements: We thank Naomi Feldman, David Genesove, Gilles Grolleau, Daniel Hamermesh, Ori Heffetz, Leah Borovoi, Tata Pyatigorsky-Ruffle and seminar participants at numerous conferences and departmental seminars for helpful comments. Ayala Waichman provided valuable research assistance.

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1 Introduction

Beauty is an age-old industry. For thousands of years, men and especially women have pursued varied means to accentuate their facial and bodily features. The Ancient Egyptians employed makeup to enhance their eyes and other cosmetics to paint their faces. Cosmetics continued to be widely sought after by the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Israelites. The Polynesians have considered intricate tattoos a sign of beauty for many centuries. Ear, nose, lip, tongue and body piercings all predate the modern era as means of adornment. Similarly, ancient customs and practices like the use of skin-care products, hairstyles, jewelry, fashion, fragrances and even plastic cosmetic surgery contribute to today's multi-trillion-dollar beauty industry worldwide. The goals of beauty enhancement are no doubt multifaceted: improved mate selection, increased confidence and self-esteem, and signaling wealth or social status, to name a few. As economists, we may well ask to what extent does physical attractiveness help one's career?

In this paper, we address one aspect of the economic value of beauty by exploring its role in the earliest stage of the hiring process. We sent 5312 CVs in six different versions in response to 2656 advertised job postings in Israel. Half of these CVs contained a picture of an attractive or plain-looking male or female job candidate. Each of these picture CVs was paired with an otherwise identical control CV with no picture. In Israel it is neither taboo to embed a headshot of oneself in the top corner of one's job resume (as in Anglo-Saxon countries such as the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia), nor is it a social norm (as in most continental European countries). Rather the choice to include a photograph on one's job resume is left to the candidate with the result that some do, while others don't. This fact makes Israel an opportune location to explore the effect of a picture and its attractiveness (or lack thereof) on the likelihood of being invited for a job interview.

We find that attractive males are significantly more likely to be called back and invited for an interview than no-picture males and more than twice as likely as plain males. Surprisingly, among female candidates, no-picture females have the highest response rate, 22% higher than

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plain females and 30% higher than attractive females. These orderings are largely robust to a number of job characteristics such as whether the job requires previous work experience and even whether the job involves face-to-face dealings with the public. The penalization of attractive women contradicts robust findings from the psychology and organizational behavior literatures on beauty that associate attractiveness, male and female alike, with almost every conceivable positive trait and disposition.

Our design strategy of sending CVs in pairs (i.e., one picture CV and one identical nopicture CV) allows us to eliminate job selection as a possible explanation for these differences. Who does the hiring provides a first clue as to the source of the punishment of attractive women: when employment agencies are in charge of hiring, attractive female candidates are no worse off than plain candidates and penalized only modestly compared to no-picture females; whereas, when the companies at which the hired candidate will work are responsible for hiring, attractive females are singled out for punishment, with a response rate of nearly half that of plain and no-picture women. Additional analyses and a post-experiment survey on a number of companies in our sample address other explanations related to both statistical and taste-based discrimination. We are able to refute some of the statistical explanations and present considerable evidence in support of one taste-based explanation, namely, female jealousy.

In the next section, we review some of the relevant beauty literature from psychology, organizational behavior and economics. Of particular interest, Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) present empirical evidence that plain-looking males earn 9% less than attractive males, while plain-looking females earn 14% less than attractive females. Our paper complements theirs by focusing on beauty-based labor-market discrimination with respect to job search opportunities rather than differential salaries. Another distinction between our papers is that Hamermesh and Biddle may not be aware of candidates' qualifications and abilities to the same degree as the employer. Our experiment affords the researcher complete control and observability of candidates' backgrounds. In fact, all of our job applicants are identical in every respect including their education, work experience and language and computer skills.

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The only difference between candidates' CVs is the picture or absence thereof. This feature allows us to attribute confidently any differences in response rates between CVs to the picture.

Section 3 details the research design and experimental procedures. In section 4, we present the results and analyses. Section 5 explores several possible explanations for our findings. Section 6 concludes with some implications for job search and for hiring.

2 Related Literature

2.1 Perceptions of Physically Attractive People

Decades of beauty research in psychology have firmly established that individuals attribute a broad range of positive traits to physically attractive people. Dion et al.'s (1972) pioneering study reveals that attractive people are believed to have better career prospects, to possess socially desirable traits (such as sensitivity, kindness, poise, modesty and outgoingness), to be better spouses, lead happier lives and to be happier overall. In fact, the paper's title summarizes the results, "What is beautiful is good". This paper spawned a large beauty literature surveyed in Feingold (1992). His meta-analysis of this literature demonstrates a robust association for both men and women between physical attractiveness and numerous personality traits, social skills, mental health and intelligence.

Using several well known experimental economics games, researchers have similarly found that physical beauty elicits altruistic, trusting and cooperative behavior among student participants. For instance, Solnick and Schweitzer (1999) show that although ultimatumgame offers of attractive and unattractive players do not differ from one another, attractive respondents receive significantly higher offers than unattractive ones.

In the trust game, Wilson and Eckel (2006) demonstrate that attractive trustees are trusted more but that attractive trusters are also expected to trust more. When the latter does not hold, the trustees return less in the second stage of the game. In the public goods

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game, Andreoni and Petrie (2006) find that attractive players earn more not because they contribute less to the public good but because the presence of an attractive group member increases other players' contributions. Like Wilson and Eckel, Andreoni and Petrie also observe that individuals expect attractive players to behave more pro-socially. When this expectation is not met, contributions decline in subsequent rounds relative to groups with no attractive members. In both of these studies, the observed "beauty premium" is unrelated to attractive players' actions. Instead, consistent with the psychology literature above, others' expect attractive people to be more trusting and cooperative in the respective games. In surveys, there is no downside to these elevated expectations. In incentivized two-player games, however, the failure to meet these expectations can lead to a "beauty penalty".

Berggren et al.'s (2010) study of political elections in Finland shows that a one-standard deviation in beauty increases the average non-incumbent candidate's votes by 20%. However, no significant beauty effect is found for incumbent candidates (with whom the electorate is well acquainted). One explanation for these divergent findings is that in the absence of reliable information about candidates, voters make positive inferences based on attractiveness.

To state the well known, people draw inferences based on others' appearances. Eckel and Petrie (2010) find that trusters and trustees in laboratory trust games are both willing to pay to see a (non-payoff-relevant) photograph of their partner. The observations that trusters (whose transfer decision is risky) exhibit a higher demand for photos than trustees and that trusters who purchase photos use them to differentiate their trust suggest the strategic value in photographs. In other words, people are willing to pay see the faces of those with whom they transact. They then use this information to discriminate between individuals in their choices. We ask whether face discrimination exists in a competitive hiring environment.

2.2 Beauty in the Labor Market

There are a number of laboratory experiments that relate to the role of beauty in the labor market. In Heilman and Saruwatari's (1979) early study, 45 undergraduates participated

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in a decision-making scenario in which they were asked to evaluate different job packets for potential managerial and clerical positions. The job packets contained relevant materials including a picture of an attractive or unattractive male or female candidate. The authors find that while attractiveness is advantageous for men in both types of jobs, attractive women are favored over unattractive women for clerical jobs only. Attractive women are rated lower for managerial positions. Cann, Siegfried and Pearce (1981) employ a similar methodology using 244 psychology undergraduates. They ask whether the robust preference for male and for attractive candidates that others had found can be negated if subjects first rate candidates' specific qualifications before judging their overall suitability for the job. Their results show that men and attractive candidates continue to be significantly preferred even after specific qualifications have been evaluated.

Yet, these and other studies like them rely on small samples of student subjects participating hypothetical scenarios modeled after hiring decisions. Our research, by contrast, is based on a much larger sample of real job opening posted by actual employers. Our design allows us to examine whether there exists a preference for attractive candidates, whether this preference interacts with the applicant's sex and whether this preference depends on a number of observable job characteristics.

More recently, Mobius and Rosenblat (2006) design an incentivized experimental labor market in which employers pay wages to workers who perform a maze-solving task. Physically attractive workers are no better in solving mazes than less attractive ones. Notwithstanding, attractive workers are offered higher wages.

Using broad household surveys in the U.S. and Canada on labor-market and demographic characteristics in which the interviewer rated the respondent's physical appearance, Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) show that plain-looking people earn less than average-looking individuals who earn less than good-looking folks. Moreover, the plainness penalty is slightly larger than the beauty premium, and both are higher for men than women. Finally, they find the beauty premium to be robust across occupations, suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination.

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Biddle and Hamermesh (1998) track the earnings over time of graduates from a prestigious law school. Based on photographs of matriculants in entering classes, the authors find a weakly positive, but insignificant, relationship between beauty and first-year lawyers' earnings. Five years after graduation, this beauty premium becomes significant and continues to grow in magnitude over the 15 years graduates were surveyed. Better-looking midcareer attorneys are both in greater demand (i.e., work more hours) and bill at higher rates.

Based on a exit survey at five restaurants, Parrett (2007) finds that attractive waitresses (but not waiters) receive higher tips. Parrett's ability to control for server productivity (through responses to a survey question on the quality of service provided by the server) leads him to conclude that the observed beauty premium for female waitresses follows from pure customer discrimination based on beauty. Our research complements these studies that find wage discrimination as a function of beauty by asking whether and what type of beauty discrimination occurs at the earliest stages of the hiring process.

The paper most similar to ours in methodology is Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004). They sent out 2435 fictitious CVs in response to advertised job openings in the Boston and Chicago areas. To investigate racial discrimination, they varied the applicant's name, using names distinctly associated with whites and with African Americans. We also respond to job advertisements by sending CVs in a number of different versions. However, our versions differ by whether they include a picture of the applicant and, if so, whether the photographed person is physically attractive or unattractive (i.e., plain-looking). To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first paper to explore beauty discrimination in the hiring process of an actual labor market (rather than a laboratory market or hypothetical decision scenario).

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3 Experimental Design and Procedures

3.1 Selection of Job Candidates' Photographs

The first step in the experimental design was to collect photographs in order to choose pictures of attractive and plain-looking males and females to be included in CVs sent to employers. We solicited headshots from the general student population at Ben-Gurion University. We assured students that the pictures would be used for research purposes only and anonymously with no identifying information attached to the picture. Students whose pictures were selected were paid 50 NIS (about $14 USD) and signed a standard photograph release form.

Hundreds of pictures were submitted. After eliminating blurry, group or otherwise inappropriate photos, there remained over 300 pictures. Both researchers along with a couple of female assistants went over all of these remaining photos and further eliminated photos of students whose ethinicity could be readily identified (see below) or those who clearly fit neither extreme of attractive or plain-looking. This left us with 161 photos (78 males and 83 females) from which to choose. We formed a panel of eight judges (four male and four female) ranging in age from 28 to 49 with various professional backgrounds that include sculptor, hair stylist, public relations and economist. The judges were asked to rate on a 1-to-9 scale each of the 161 pictures along three dimensions: physical attractiveness, intelligence and likely ethnicity (where 1 equals "definitely Sephardic", 9 equals "definitely Ashkenazi" and 5 is "uncertain"). While the attractiveness ranking is our focus, the ethnicity rating is important because there exists substantial evidence that Jews of north African and Middle Eastern origin (i.e., Sephardic Jews) are discriminated against compared to Jews of European origin (i.e., Ashkenazi Jews).1

1 Fershtman and Gneezy (2001) provide laboratory evidence that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews alike display less trust toward Sephardic males than Ashkenazi males (identified by their family name) in a twoplayer trust game. Rubinstein and Brenner (2009) examine empirically the earnings of native Israelis born of interethnic marriage. They find that males born to Ashkenazi mothers and Sephardic fathers (and thus bear a Sephardic family name) earn significantly less than males born to Sephardic mothers and Ashkenazi fathers (and thus have an Ashkenazi family name).

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