Beautiful Female Job Seekers, Beware
Jerusalem, Israel (TML) – Beautiful women may get first dibs for a place on the cheerleading squad or for a partner on the dance floor, but when it comes to the job market they would do better to hide their looks, a new study by Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has found.
Conventional wisdom has it that beautiful people are the most likely to be hired, even though laboratory tests and studies using hypothetical situations have found exactly the opposite to be the case. Two Ben-Gurion economists, however, broke new ground in their study “Are Good-Looking People More Employable?” by sending resumes — some with photographs of attractive women, some with pictures of Plain Janes and some with no picture at all — to real advertised job listings.
It was a bad day for the beautiful. Pictureless resumes were the most likely to get a call-back for an interview — 22% more than the resumes of Plain Janes and 30% more than for attractive women.
“I assumed the beauty premium for women was higher, but it was not,” Dr. Bradley Ruffle, one of the two economists who conducted the study, told The Media Line. “I suspected the order would go attractive, no picture and then plain. This was the exact result with the male applicants, but female candidates were treated differently.”
Attractive males elicited a callback on their resumes 19.9% of the time, while among ordinary ones the rate was 13.9%, the study found. Pictureless resumes got the lowest response rate of all, with just 9.2% getting a call-back. The difference is quite significant for job seekers: An attractive male need only send five resumes to perspective employer to get an interview, while his ordinary-looking rival has to send out 11, said Ze’ev Shtudiner, a PhD candidate and Ruffle’s colleague.
“This really goes against what I would assume about the hiring process,” Ayelet Hazie, the public relations manager at Manpower Israel told, The Media Line. “The results are very interesting and not at all expected.”
Israel was the ideal testing site for the study because, unlike most other countries, there is no set standard on whether or not to include a photo in a job application.
“In Anglo-Saxon countries, it’s taboo to send a picture, whereas in continental Europe it is the norm and in China the process of attaching a picture is regulated. In Israel, it’s an in-between case, and people are free to choose and the results shed light on when or when not to use a picture,” Ruffle said.
If female beauty is a handicap to employment, blame other women. A follow-up call to the companies posting jobs revealed that 96% of the time the first-line decision maker on whether to pursue an application was in the hands of a woman. Not only that, she was likely to be young (the average age was 29) and single (67%), two characteristics associated with a “jealous response” when confronted with a young, attractive rival in the workplace, the study said.
“Companies don’t discriminate against men, they treat all males alike. And the companies treat the women without pictures the same as the plain,” Ruffle said. “But the attractive women are discriminated against.”
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