1y ago

Men benefit more from their looks at work than women do, new research shows

www.cnbc.com

Study (N=11K;20 years) finds attractive men more likely to attain better jobs & earn more than similarly attractive women. Attractive women had a slight advantage over unattractive women but men saw greatest benefits. For women being attractive is incompatible with stereotypes of leaders. “Women are held to a specific standard of attractiveness & are often punished when they fail to uphold that standard, but then they’re punished when they do—it’s a lose-lose situation.”

10 comments

In ways, this doesn't really surprise me. But, it's neat to see some actual data on this. Ultimately, sexism reigns supreme, as per usual, in the workplace.
I do think there are some minor methodological issues with this study, but they really aren't worth going into.
An okcupid research had shown that most (80%) men were considered below average by women
Since it's so rare to be an attractive man I could imagine if you did a study like that, depending on how you chose and rate participants, you could be comparing men's 2 first deciles with women's 5+ first deciles
- This is a pretty questionable study. The supplementary materials don't have any breakdown of the 11000 volunteers at all, like how many were were in each category, how many people they had rating them, did they have exactly the same group rating all 11,000, etc.
  Also was there any follow-up on this to account for changes over 20 years? I know plenty of people at 15 who would have been attractive, but not been by the time they were 35. Weight gain, bad plastic surgery, accidents, generally ageing poorly, etc.
  
  I think there's more rigorous studies but done on smaller numbers of participants, but sci-hub's captchas are broken today so that's where that ends.
  I know of other data blog posts going in the same general vibe from tinder hinge etc but no serious study has asked >1000 people to "rate" other people
- 80% of men trolling a dating site are unattractive? Seems like a pretty reasonable estimation to me. Like, you're literally looking at the environment that we'd expect to most select for unattractive people. It's literally a pile of respondents who can't find a date, but want one. You could hardly find a more biasing source for the generation of this particular Snapple fact.

10 comments