We’d be outraged if a business owner told an employee she wouldn’t receive her bonus unless she lost weight. With most jobs, our looks should be regarded as irrelevant to our suitability and remuneration. What matters is that we have the skills for the job and put them to good use. Yet appearance discrimination, or ‘lookism’, is pervasive and consequential in the workplace. Can lookism in employment ever be justified? And, when it can’t, should we legislate against it?
Much the
same questions arise in relation to race and gender. There are cases when each
of these can be regarded, reasonably, as a ‘genuine occupational requirement’,
for example, ‘being a woman’ for a women’s refuge support worker. But it is
equally clear that ‘being a man’ cannot justifiably count as a qualification
for being a doctor, even if patients might be happier receiving medical advice
from a man because, for sexist reasons, they rate men’s medical skills more
highly. And that is so even though there’s a sense in which being a man is a
genuine qualification for the job when a male doctor would be better able to
minister to patients’ needs because their prejudices mean they’d trust him more
and hence be more receptive to his advice. In other words, there are some
genuine qualifications that it is not justifiable to count.
Consider
two cases that concern the treatment of employees in the workplace and vividly
raise worries about appearance unjustifiably counting as a qualification. The
first relates to a performance evaluation of an employee called Courtney at a
Canadian fashion company whose manager said her looks were affecting her
ability to do her job. Interviewed by the BBC in 2022, Courtney said:
He then
advised her to start going to the gym and avoid wearing fitted clothing.
Unsurprisingly, Courtney felt shell-shocked. Subsequently, her appearance
anxieties had a negative impact on her work because she was distracted by
worries about what her colleagues thought of her.
The second
case relates to an accusation in 2020 by the UK radio journalist Libby Purves
against the BBC. Purves claimed that, for presenters on both television and
radio, older women were under greater pressure than men of a similar age to
appear younger, since women are judged on their looks, and part of what it is
to be attractive for women is to look youthful. In an opinion piece for the
Radio Times, she wrote:
“Sue Barker
has been binned from A Question of Sport after 23 years. She is 64. More
willingly, Jenni Murray and Jane Garvey depart from Woman’s Hour, aged 70 and
56. They are replaced by Emma Barnett, a mere 35. What is this? … Are we
written off as old trouts while men become revered elders, sacred patriarchs,
silver foxes?”
In both
cases, lookism seems entangled with sex or gender discrimination, and, in the
second case, with age discrimination too. This might provoke the thought that
appearance discrimination is problematic only when it is entwined with some
other form of discrimination, and that there is no reason to be concerned about
it when it occurs on its own. But that seems clearly false. Appearance
discrimination matters in its own right, and indeed operates in many of the
same ways as other forms of discrimination we are committed to fighting, such
as racial discrimination. Just as prejudices influence behaviour consciously
and non-consciously in racial discrimination, so too they operate in conscious
and non-conscious ways in lookism. Our responses to the looks of others often
involve unjustified associations, whether positive or negative, between
appearance features and character traits. These associations may function as
implicit biases, or sometimes take the form of stereotypes that are endorsed
with varying degrees of unreflectiveness.
Women
especially are often seen as lazy or lacking in self-discipline if they are
perceived as overweight. But even though lifestyle choices make a difference to
shape, the hunger we experience and how much we weigh are largely determined by
metabolism or physiology. So the idea that all or even most people with a
heavier weight lack self-control is unsustainable when brought into contact
with the evidence. In her book Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia (2024), Kate
Manne concludes that ‘fatness has a strong genetic basis … at least 70 per cent
of the variance in body mass that we find in the human population is likely due
to genetics.’
Of course,
it is not just selectors evaluating qualifications who are prone to biases.
Good looks tend to be beneficial in doing a range of jobs because of how others
respond to them. Viewers may prefer to watch attractive newsreaders deliver the
TV news, perhaps in part because they associate their appearance with desirable
character traits, such as trustworthiness. Customers may be put off interacting
with employees they regard as fat because they find their appearance unattractive
or judge them to be ill-disciplined. It’s for reasons of this sort that good
looks can be genuine qualifications for working in customer-facing roles, even
though there is a further question about whether it’s justifiable to count
them.
Qualifications
that arise in this way are often referred to as ‘reaction qualifications’,
meaning qualifications produced by customer reactions to employee
characteristics. As a result, even selectors who do not share the customers’
biases have a reason to appoint people with their customers’ preferred
features, and to reject those with features their customers dislike. In
contrast, when a technical skill is a qualification for a job, its role as a
qualification, and indeed its status as a skill, doesn’t generally rely on
others’ reactions to it. All that matters is that it is deployed in making a
product that people want or providing a service they need. For example, the
skill of giving competent legal advice is a qualification for being a lawyer,
regardless of how others respond to it.
In addition
to the association between heavier weight and laziness or lack of self-control,
people routinely make other appearance-related associations. Short men are
often regarded as prickly or prone to aggression on the basis that they have
inferiority complexes. Facial scarring, and other so-called ‘facial
disfigurements’, are often associated with unpleasantness or nastiness – think
of Hollywood villains. Again, these associations don’t stand up against the
evidence. When reaction qualifications are rooted in unjustified associations,
is it fair to count them? We don’t think it’s morally acceptable to count
reaction qualifications when they are grounded in, say, customers’ prejudices
against women or members of a particular race, so why think it’s morally
acceptable to count such qualifications when they are grounded in customers’
prejudices against particular appearance features?
Even when
they don’t involve prejudices or unjustified associations, customers’
perceptions about whether an assistant is good looking, and indeed the
perceptions of job recruiters, are usually a product of ‘internalising’
appearance norms – that is, rules concerning how we should look – that reflect
conventional aesthetic preferences. Some of these norms may have gained
currency over many generations, as a result of the way that being disposed to
act from them when choosing sexual partners bestows evolutionary advantages, as
Nancy Etcoff argues in Survival of the Prettiest (2000). Perhaps this is true
of norms that favour unblemished skin or symmetrical faces. But other
appearance norms expressing aesthetic preferences emerge from practices that
are specific to particular cultures, and may even be a product of differences
in power and privilege. For example, the emergence of norms regarding tightly
coiled hair as messy, or favouring narrow rather than broad noses, or lighter
over darker skin tones, can perhaps be fully explained by the way in which they
reflect and perpetuate racial hierarchies – that is, they come to be endorsed
because they legitimate the power and privilege that accrues to membership in
particular racial groups. Even when norms are not the product of power and
privilege, their application may end up benefiting people who are already
advantaged, and further disadvantaging those who are already disadvantaged.
Think here of norms biased against women or the elderly, or both, such as norms
that regard youthfulness as part of what it is to be an attractive woman, which
Purves thinks are influencing decisions at the BBC.
But there’s
no getting away from the fact that ignoring customer preferences would be bad
for business. Therefore, reaction qualifications grounded in such preferences
provide some credibility to recruitment decisions based on them. In contrast,
when selectors but not customers are influenced by looks, then no such
justification is available. We don’t know whether vendors were put off by
Courtney’s appearance or whether it was only her manager who had a problem with
it. But it is surely unfair to candidates when managers’ hiring (or promotion)
decisions are influenced by employees’ appearance if it is not even a reaction
qualification. Indeed, it is generally unfair to take into account features of
a person, whether racial membership or looks, when these have absolutely
nothing to do with their ability to do the job.
Prejudices
and negative associations concerning various appearance features unfairly
reduce the range of career opportunities for people with these features. This
then contributes to an unjust distribution of resources, and may even reinforce
structural injustices. According to Daniel Hamermesh’s analysis of data from the
United States in Beauty Pays (2011), the overall ‘beauty premium’ for
above-average-looking women, compared with below-average-looking women, is 12
per cent; for above-average-looking men, compared with below-average-looking
men, it is 17 per cent. Perhaps appearance is a legitimate qualification for
some jobs, such as modelling, in which case not all such inequalities will be
unjust, but often lookism seems analogous to racial discrimination, and
condemnable for many of the same reasons.
But there
are also cases of lookism that are rather different from racial discrimination
because they involve responding to chosen features of appearance, such as
tattoos, hairstyles and piercings. It is tempting to say that if a person is
disadvantaged by an appearance feature they’ve chosen, in full knowledge that
acquiring it will affect their employment prospects, then there is no
injustice. But even here, customers may be opposed to such features for no good
reason, for example, when tattoos are unjustifiably associated with aggression
or mental health problems. Is it fair, in a job market, to disadvantage a
person by her choices when that disadvantage reflects the prejudices of
selectors or customers responding negatively to features she’s chosen for
herself and that may even have become part of her identity?
Appearance
features that are favoured or disfavoured in the job market may also be chosen
by people in a way that reflects their own ethical commitments rather than
dominant appearance norms. For example, some women choose not to wear makeup
because they want to resist the idea of women as aesthetically appealing
objects. As Clare Chambers writes in Intact (2022), they endorse the principle
of the unmodified body – that our bodies are alright just as they are. As a
resistance to body-shaming practices, people may consciously eschew body
modifications and withstand the pressures placed on them by the often vicious
comments they receive. Others may be committed to ethical principles derived
from their religion requiring conformity to unconventional appearance norms or
dress codes.
So
appearance features may express deeply held convictions about how one should
live. When companies have an ethos that reflects such convictions, and they
discriminate in their selection practices to promote that ethos, then that
often seems unobjectionable. Suppose, for example, that a company has an ethos
that reflects a commitment to not wearing makeup, and requires their employees
to adopt ‘a natural look’ as a condition of employment. That does not seem
morally problematic in the context of a society where there is an expectation
in a wide range of jobs that women should wear makeup. Yet in other cases,
appearance codes may discriminate against members of a particular religion,
even if they do so unintentionally. For example, a dress code forbidding
employees from wearing head coverings seems morally problematic because of the
way in which it disadvantages Muslim women.
Lookism in
employment is therefore a mixed bag. Some cases seem to involve the same
characteristic mechanisms as racial discrimination, including prejudices influencing
hiring decisions, to be morally condemned for much the same reasons. Other
cases seem rather different. They may differ because the appearance-related
values that companies express in their hiring practices neither reflect
prejudices nor deny the fundamental equality of different people. Or they may
differ because the appearance features that recruiters count as reaction
qualifications are unobjectionable, perhaps in part because these features are
genuinely a matter of choice for job applicants.
In cases
where lookism is morally problematic, what should we do about it? Should we
think of it as posing a moral problem of sufficient magnitude that there is a
case for seeking to prevent it by legislation? Or is it better to tackle it
without recourse to the legal system? There is evidence that lookism in
employment is comparable in pervasiveness and harmfulness with other forms of
discrimination, including racial discrimination. On the basis of his analysis
of the data, Hamermesh maintains that, in the US:
“African
American men’s earnings disadvantage, adjusted for the earnings-enhancing
characteristics that they bring to labour markets, is similar to the
disadvantage experienced by below-average compared to above-average-looking
male workers generally.”
Of course,
there are differences between racial discrimination and appearance
discrimination that may impact upon the case for enacting legislation to
prevent it, and not merely the fact that (unlike race) some appearance features
are chosen. Racial membership is commonly transmitted from one generation to
another, whereas the inheritance of appearance-related characteristics is less
reliable. The way in which racial discrimination contributes to and reproduces
structural disadvantages through practices of segregation gives rise to
distinctive problems in tackling it. Nevertheless, some of the same reasons
that provide a strong case for prohibiting racial discrimination also apply to
appearance discrimination.
The
long-term solution to the injustices of lookism involves taking measures to
reduce the enormous weight ordinarily placed on appearance in our society and
seeking to change appearance norms so that they become more inclusive. But
given the magnitude of the problem, we should take seriously the idea that
legislation also has role to play. Should we make ‘appearance’ or appearance
features such as height, weight and facial differences protected
characteristics, in the same way that, in countries like the UK, race, sex,
sexual orientation, disability, religion and age are ‘protected
characteristics’, meaning it is illegal to discriminate on their basis?
Perhaps
legislation against ‘indirect’ discrimination, that is, against policies and
practices that unintentionally affect people with a protected characteristic in
a negative way, is enough to criminalise much appearance discrimination in
hiring and promotion decisions, providing an underutilised way of combatting
it. Suppose that appearance norms and dress codes are biased against people
with tightly coiled hair, or with darker skin tones, or with asymmetrical faces
or bodies, or with wrinkly skin, or against those who see it as part of their
religious duty to dress modestly, or against women who object to being required
to wear makeup or heels. Then selecting people on the basis of their conformity
to these norms (or their willingness to conform to them) will stand in need of
justification in any legislative scheme that requires indirect discrimination
on grounds of race, sex, disability, age or religion to be a proportionate
means to a legitimate goal. But it is not clear that legislation against
indirect discrimination is enough to deal adequately with the moral challenge
posed by lookism in employment.
My proposal
would be this: we make it illegal to reject a person on the basis of their
appearance, or particular appearance-related features, when no plausible case
can be made that these features are qualifications for the job in question –
when possession of them can’t even be seen as a way of conforming to a
company’s ethos or attracting its customers or clients. We could add to this
the requirement that reaction qualifications, that is, qualifications that rely
on the responses of customers, shouldn’t be given any weight if they rest upon
customers’ prejudices about an appearance feature, where prejudices are
generalisations or associations that aren’t sustained by the publicly available
evidence. And we could make it a presumption that when the background culture
is infused with these prejudices about a particular appearance feature, then
reaction qualifications related to that feature should be regarded as
illegitimate, unless evidence can be produced for thinking that customer
preferences for it are unconnected to such prejudices.
Some may be
sceptical about whether legislation against lookism could be effective, with
good reasons. Part of the problem with legislation in this area is that there is
likely to be resistance to making use of it – who wants to admit that others
regard them as unattractive? Furthermore, appearance discrimination can be hard
to detect and monitor. The legislation itself wouldn’t require us to make
objective judgments about people’s attractiveness. We just have to know that
selectors have been influenced by the candidates’ appearance, or by the
particular appearance features they possess, when these have nothing to do with
their ability to do the job. But we do need to be able to monitor different
companies to see whether there is any reason to think that they aren’t
complying with the legislation. With race and gender, we can examine
percentages in the workforce or selected through the appointment process. But
how can we do that in relation to an attractive appearance?
There is a
surprisingly large amount of intersubjective agreement concerning judgments of
attractiveness, and it may well be enough to collect the data required for
monitoring purposes. So I think that the objections to legislation against
appearance discrimination are not insuperable. It is feasible, and no less
desirable than other forms of antidiscrimination legislation. But perhaps the
main function of legislation against appearance discrimination would be to send
out a message to employers, and society more generally, that lookism is
unacceptable, and to give companies a reason to examine their practices and
reform them if they encourage lookism or give it too much space in which to
operate. We might even regard it as good practice for recruitment interviewees
to be behind a screen, as is sometimes done when auditioning musicians. In the
context of employment at least, we should combat what Francesca Minerva calls
the ‘invisible discrimination’ that takes place right before our eyes. We’ve
been too complacent about lookism at the workplace for too long.
The scourge
of lookism. By Andrew Mason. Aeon, April 4, 2024.
Today,
let’s peel back the layers on a topic that’s as delicate as it is pervasive:
the beauty bias. You know, that unspoken rule in both professional and social
circles that often dictates who gets ahead and who gets overlooked based on
looks alone. It’s a bit like choosing players for a team based on their jerseys
rather than their skills. Sounds unfair, right? Because it is.
A Personal
Wake-Up Call
I’ll never
forget my first real encounter with lookism. It was during a job interview
right out of college. I was prepared, my resume polished to a shine, but the
feedback I got was a curveball I didn’t see coming. “You just don’t fit the
image we’re looking for,” they said. It was a moment that made me question:
since when did capability come with a “look”?
The Unfair
Advantage of Beauty
Lookism, or
beauty bias, is this unwritten rule that attractive people are more likely to
succeed. Studies have shown that those deemed more attractive are often hired
sooner, promoted faster, and even paid more. It’s as if their appearance adds
an invisible boost to their qualifications. In social settings, this bias can
dictate who gets noticed and who fades into the background, shaping friendships
and relationships in subtle but significant ways.
1. The
Professional Impact
In the
workplace, lookism can undermine meritocracy, creating an environment where
looks can trump talent. It’s a tricky terrain to navigate, especially when
feedback on performance gets entangled with appearance. The message it sends?
That your skills and hard work might not be enough if you don’t “look the
part.”
2. The
Social Spiral
Socially,
the beauty bias can be equally damaging, setting unrealistic standards for
acceptance and belonging. It can lead to a spiral of comparison and self-doubt,
affecting our self-esteem and how we interact with others. It’s like being back
in high school, where the social hierarchy was often based on appearances.
Challenging
Lookism
So, how do
we confront this bias? It starts with awareness. Recognizing that lookism
exists is the first step toward dismantling it. From there, we can actively
challenge our perceptions and the stereotypes we’ve unconsciously bought into.
1.
Promoting Diversity and Inclusion
In
professional settings, promoting diversity and inclusion goes beyond race and
gender. It’s about valuing individuals for their talents and contributions, not
their conformity to a certain aesthetic. Companies need to lead by example,
creating cultures where diversity in appearance is celebrated as much as
diversity in thought.
2.
Fostering Genuine Connections
Socially,
we can strive to build connections based on shared interests, values, and
mutual respect. It’s about looking beyond the surface and appreciating people
for who they are, not just what they look like. True beauty, after all, is
found in the depth of our character and the kindness we extend to others.
Your
Thoughts?
I’m curious
to hear about your experiences with the beauty bias. Have you felt its impact
in your professional or personal life? How do you think we can work together to
challenge and change these deep-seated perceptions?
Remember,
confronting lookism isn’t about diminishing the importance of
self-presentation; it’s about broadening our definition of beauty and
recognizing the value in diversity.
The Beauty
Bias: Confronting Lookism in Professional and Social Arenas. By Brightbluemind.
Medium, February 15, 2024.
Miss Universe is turning 71 — not the current titleholder, who is aged 29, but the competition itself. A proud septuagenarian sashaying toward its next birthday (the more modestly titled Miss World is only a year older), Miss Universe will hold its annual show on Saturday, 18 November. Many readers might be surprised to learn both competitions are still going strong. In fairness, from the stiletto heels and robotic hand waves to the pouting pursuit of world peace, it is hard to deny that these pageants seem passé. If beauty contests seem pitiful and anachronistic, a phenomenon from a bygone era, it would still be a mistake to believe we live in a post-beauty world.
Whilst the crowned winner of Miss Universe can expect to net some lucrative marketing deals and make a cool million or two from endorsements and advertising, for the rest of us, beauty is also bankable.
I speak not
of the billion-dollar industries devoted to peddling makeup and skincare
products, nor of the trade in nips, tucks and tweaks from cosmetic surgery or
Botox. Instead, I speak of the most concealed, yet in-your-face bias known to
humankind: pretty privilege. The fact is that beauty is not merely skin-deep;
it has deep pockets.
You might
suspect that “attractiveness bias” is a bogus source of bigotry, a parvenu of
prejudice eager to jump on the injustice bandwagon. In fact, beauty bias is a
force for some pretty ugly modern discrimination. Sometimes called “lookism”
the phenomenon has even given rise to an economic field called “pulchronomics”.
Less attractive people are less likely to be hired and more likely to be fired.
In contrast, beautiful people do better when it comes to loans, employment and
even restaurant tips. In 2015, a US study reported that more attractive servers
pocketed $1,261 more per year in tips than their unattractive peers.
The
better-looking aren’t just better off; beauty is a life-altering asset. It can
interfere with teachers’ accuracy in rating students’ academic performance.
Beauty also influences our life-long earning potential. Earlier this month, a
study tracking the fate of American adolescents twenty years into adulthood
found that physical attractiveness independently predicted social mobility,
with the effect size greater for men than women.
One of the
most underreported side effects of the pandemic was that social distancing
seemed to momentarily take off the beauty blinkers. COVID-19 afforded countless
more opportunities to show that covering up can influence our judgments. A
study conducted in China during the pandemic found that after masking up, more
average-looking hotel employees received a boost in their customer service
ratings; this reversed when the wearers were better-looking. In Sweden, when
classes moved online, attractive female students missing the boon of
face-to-face teaching scored lower grades (though for male students, the
“beauty premium” remained).
Beauty can
also serve as aesthetic armour, protecting the fate of the physically fortunate
when they screw up. Multiple studies show that even when they commit crimes,
the gorgeous are less likely to be found guilty. In the U.S., a recent
long-term study reported that young people who were judged to be more
attractive were “less likely to be arrested and convicted than less attractive
persons”.
If all this
isn’t enough, aside from crowning them with tiaras, we bestow on the beautiful
halo of morality. Whilst movie moguls cast the blemished, scarred or pockmarked
as baddies, the rest of us are equally guilty of casting the good-looking as,
well, morally good and stereotyping the less captivating amongst us as less
moral and more impure.
Despite
this, and decades of research holding up a mirror to humankind’s ugly
tendencies, defending the less lovely hasn’t exactly taken off. Maybe that’s
because it’s less Instagram-able. My best bet is we’ll never witness
celebrities with an activist bracelet highlighting beauty bigotry or adopting
the hashtag “end lookism”. In an epoch of social activism, attractiveness bias
is the last taboo. We shouldn’t give up, though, just because the bold and
beautiful literally have skin in the game.
In the quest to right these wrongs, some have taken an unhelpful if well-meaning tack. One such common approach is to deny beauty exists in any objective sense. Earlier in November the Guardian inaugurated “Ask Ugly” — a self-styled anti-attractiveness agony aunt column. Here, the word beauty was embarrassed to be seen without scare quotes: “‘Beauty’”, the feature declared “is a culturally constructed illusion … It is meaningless …” Yet, in a Schrodinger’s cat-like confession, the columnist seemed to admit beauty did exist after all, since “it affects how a person is perceived”.
Attractiveness
certainly does have a subjective aspect. When it comes to pin-ups, we can and
do differ in our personal tastes and preferences.
Beauty is
not merely in the eye of one beholder, though. The truth is people tend to
agree about who is more and who is less attractive, both within and across
cultures. Of the 7.8 billion of us on planet Earth, we do not all get to become
a pin-up.
The
Guardian column’s suggestion that beauty is simply imprinted on our minds by
some external force, like a giant cultural embossing stamp in a Terry Gilliam
Monty Python cartoon, does not hold either. Ideas of attractiveness did not
demand to grace the cover of Vogue magazine, like some alien diva determined to
manipulate human thinking.
Reality is
more prosaic. We are great apes, and our mindware is primarily influenced but
not implacably determined by the four fs: feeding, fleeing, fighting and
reproduction. It should come as no great surprise to any human being that
beauty is linked to health, fertility and strength. Consequently, it is
unlikely a 71-year-old will win Miss Universe, that consumers will demand
cosmetic surgeons create wrinkles, or that Boots will ever sell products to
make crepey skin. Beauty will always be the provenance of the young. We all
know this.
Of course,
attractiveness has its place. Who doesn’t enjoy a looker? In some jobs, beauty
might be exactly what we need and want. In other contexts, when it leads to
injustice or harm, we need to work harder and do better. We can’t do that if we
don’t first admit beauty exists.
When the Miss
Universe candidates start to strut their stuff on Saturday, rather than
labelling them shallow, we would do well to remember we’ve all got a touch of
the pageant jurist. The only difference is, outside the sequined realm of
beauty queens, the rewards at stake are more substantial than rhinestone
tiaras.
The tyranny
of beauty. By Charlotte Blease. The Critic, November 18, 2023.
A manager
sits behind a table and decides he’s going to fire a woman because he doesn’t
like her skin. If he fires her because her skin is brown, we call that racism
and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin is female, we
call that sexism and there is legal recourse. If he fires her because her skin
is pockmarked and he finds her unattractive, well, we don’t talk about that
much and, in most places in America, there is no legal recourse.
This is
puzzling. We live in a society that abhors discrimination on the basis of many
traits. And yet one of the major forms of discrimination is lookism, prejudice
against the unattractive. And this gets almost no attention and sparks little
outrage. Why?
Lookism
starts, like every form of bigotry, with prejudice and stereotypes.
Studies
show that most people consider an “attractive” face to have clean, symmetrical
features. We find it easier to recognize and categorize these prototypical
faces than we do irregular and “unattractive” ones. So we find it easier — from
a brain processing perspective — to look at attractive people.
Attractive
people thus start off with a slight physical advantage. But then people project
all sorts of widely unrelated stereotypes onto them. In survey after survey,
beautiful people are described as trustworthy, competent, friendly, likable and
intelligent, while ugly people get the opposite labels. This is a version of
the halo effect.
Not all the
time, but often, the attractive get the first-class treatment. Research suggests
they are more likely to be offered job interviews, more likely to be hired when
interviewed and more likely to be promoted than less attractive individuals.
They are more likely to receive loans and more likely to receive lower interest
rates on those loans.
The
discriminatory effects of lookism are pervasive. Attractive economists are more
likely to study at high-ranked graduate programs and their papers are cited
more often than papers from their less attractive peers. One study found that
when unattractive criminals committed a moderate misdemeanor, their fines were
about four times as large as those of attractive criminals.
Daniel Hamermesh, a leading scholar in this field, observed that an American worker who is among the bottom one-seventh in looks earns about 10 to 15 percent less a year than one in the top third. An unattractive person misses out on nearly a quarter-million dollars in earnings over a lifetime.
The overall
effect of these biases is vast. One 2004 study found that more people report
being discriminated against because of their looks than because of their
ethnicity.
In a study
published in the current issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Ellis P.
Monk Jr., Michael H. Esposito and Hedwig Lee report that the earnings gap
between people perceived as attractive and unattractive rivals or exceeds the
earnings gap between white and Black adults. They find the attractiveness curve
is especially punishing for Black women. Those who meet the socially dominant
criteria for beauty see an earnings boost; those who don’t earn on average just
63 cents to the dollar of those who do.
Why are we
so blasé about this kind of discrimination? Maybe people think lookism is baked
into human nature and there’s not much they can do about it. Maybe it’s because
there’s no National Association of Ugly People lobbying for change. The
economist Tyler Cowen notices that it’s often the educated coastal class that
most strictly enforces norms about thinness and dress. Maybe we don’t like
policing the bigotry we’re most guilty of?
My general
answer is that it’s very hard to buck the core values of your culture, even
when you know it’s the right thing to do.
Over the
past few decades, social media, the meritocracy and celebrity culture have
fused to form a modern culture that is almost pagan in its values. That is, it
places tremendous emphasis on competitive display, personal achievement and the
idea that physical beauty is an external sign of moral beauty and overall
worth.
Pagan
culture holds up a certain ideal hero — those who are genetically endowed in
the realms of athleticism, intelligence and beauty. This culture looks at
obesity as a moral weakness and a sign that you’re in a lower social class.
Our pagan
culture places great emphasis on the sports arena, the university and the
social media screen, where beauty, strength and I.Q. can be most impressively
displayed.
This ethos
underlies many athletic shoe and gym ads, which hold up heroes in whom physical
endowments and moral goodness are one. It’s the paganism of the C.E.O. who
likes to be flanked by a team of hot staffers. (“I must be a winner because I’m
surrounded by the beautiful.”) It’s the fashion magazine in which articles
about social justice are interspersed with photo spreads of the impossibly
beautiful. (“We believe in social equality, as long as you’re gorgeous.”) It’s
the lookist one-upmanship of TikTok.
A society
that celebrates beauty this obsessively is going to be a social context in
which the less beautiful will be slighted. The only solution is to shift the
norms and practices. One positive example comes, oddly, from Victoria’s Secret,
which replaced its “Angels” with seven women of more diverse body types. When
Victoria’s Secret is on the cutting edge of the fight against lookism, the rest
of us have some catching up to do.
Why Is It
OK to Be Mean to the Ugly? By David Brooks. The New York Times, June 24, 2021.
So-called “ugly” persons and persons with facial difference for example, are being discriminated against. We rack our brains on questions of discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexual preference, but people whose appearance may be considered unattractive are discriminated against at least as often. Is ‘lookism’ – discrimination on the basis of attractiveness – morally problematic? And if so, why are we doing so little about it? Listen to Italian philosopher Francesca Minerva on the beauty bias and the need to address this form of discrimination.
Radboud Reflects, June 16, 2021. Lecture by Francesca Minerva. Followed by a conversation with Rona Jualla van Oudenhoven.
The way we
perceive and look at each other has consequences. Beautiful people get more
attention and have more chances in society. Philosopher Francesca Minerva
clears out the topics of this so-called lookism and beauty bias.
In our
culture, we are constantly surrounded by images of beautiful people: from movie
or sport icons on the screen to people that we meet daily. Since we pay a lot
of attention to visuals, we tend to think of what is attractive is good.
However, these notions of what is attractive and what is not, cause a lot of
bias. Scientific studies show that beautiful people are more likely to get a
job or even get bigger wages. People who’re considered unattractive might get
lesser chances in society.
What is
lookism?
‘Lookism is
a term that describes the discriminatory treatment of people who are considered
to be physically unattractive. The Western standard of beauty is really narrow,
such as fair-skinned, youthful, thin, toned, and able-bodied.’
Isn’t
beauty a subjective concept?
‘Of course,
there are subjective elements, as people have different aesthetic preferences.
But it’s surprising how people tend to agree on what or who is attractive or
not. We know for example, that there’s a lot of agreement when it comes to
famous icons, people, who are considered attractive over time.’
Different
cultures have different understandings of beauty, can we generalize this?
‘While each
culture has its own standards of beauty, there are certain features that we all
consider to find attractive no matter what our culture, time, or geographic
differences are. These general features are related to our evolution.’
‘Also, the Western standard of beauty is the
one that people are the most exposed to. It has been exported due to historic
and economic reasons, such as colonization, globalization, et cetera, thus it
became dominant.’
Why is
lookism more apparent now than before?
‘Nowadays,
social media made it more radical than it used to be. All the apps and
platforms enhanced our focus on appearance, especially in terms of
relationships. The fact that we rely on these little pictures makes it
difficult for people who are considered to be visually not attractive.’
And is
there a gender dimension involved?
‘The
question of physical appearance affects women more than men. Men have evolved
to pay more attention to appearance, while women have evolved to look at other
aspects, such as social status. Of course, there are a lot of exceptions, but
this would be a biological explanation for why men are more interested in
looking than women. However, social media globally shifted our attention
towards appearance and made it more totalizing, thus gender dynamics in terms
of lookism slowly dissolve.’
Can we undo
this bias?
‘We should
be more aware that the narrow Western standard of beauty is not inclusive.
Though I think this change has started, now we have more diverse
representations of people, but it still needs to expand. Hopefully, this will
happen with time. Also, this field of study needs to be researched more.’
Beauty
bias: another form of discrimination? By
Fausta Noreikaitė. Vox, June 10, 2021. ,
Universities
position themselves as places where brains matter. It seems strange then that
students at a US university would rate attractive academics to be better
teachers. This was the finding of a recent paper from the University of
Memphis, which concluded that female academics suffered most from this.
It raises
an uncomfortable proposition, that beauty trumps brains even in 21st century
workplaces. It would certainly be supported by veteran female broadcasters such
as radio presenter Libby Purves, who recently complained about the way the BBC
dispenses with women of a certain age.
Another
survey, this time in the UK, gave a deeper sense of the problem. It reported
that employers were asking female employees to dress “sexier” and wear make-up
during video meetings.
Published
by law firm Slater and Gordon over the summer, and based on a poll of 2,000
office-based staff working from home during lockdown, the report found that 35%
of women had experienced at least one sexist demand from their employer, usually
relating to how they dressed for video meetings. Women also reported being
asked to wear more makeup, do something to their hair or dress more
provocatively. Reasons offered by their bosses were that it would “help win
business” and be “pleasing to a client”.
It seems as
though the shift to more virtual working has not eradicated what Danielle
Parsons, an employment lawyer at Slater and Gordon, described as “archaic
behaviour” which “has no place in the modern working world”. When employees’
performance is judged on the basis of their physical appearance, potentially
shaping their pay and prospects in work, it is known as lookism. It’s not illegal,
but arguably it should be.
Beauty and
the boss
The Slater
and Gordon survey findings affirm that many trends that we describe in our
recent book, Aesthetic Labour, are widespread and continuing despite remote
working. Our book reports over 20 years of research and thinking about this
problem. Although our research started by focusing on frontline work in
hospitality and retail, the same issue has expanded into a diverse range of
roles including academics, traffic wardens, recruitment consultants, interpreters,
TV news anchors and circus acrobats.
Companies
think that paying greater attention to employees’ appearance will make them
more competitive, while public sector organisations think it will make them
more liked. As a result, they are all becoming ever more prescriptive in
telling employees how they should look, dress and talk.
It happens
both to men and women, though more often to women, and is often tied in more
broadly with sexualising them at work. For example, while Slater and Gordon
found that one-third of men and women had “put up with” comments about their
appearance during video calls, women were much likelier to face degrading
requests to appear sexier.
When we
analysed ten years of employees’ complaints about lookism to the Equal
Opportunities Commission in Australia, we found that the proportion from men
was rising across sectors but that two-thirds of complaints were still from
women. Interestingly, the University of Memphis study found no correlation for
male academics between how their looks were perceived and how their performance
was rated.
Society’s
obsession
Of course,
workplaces cannot be divorced from society in general, and within the book we
chart the increasing obsession with appearance. This aestheticisation of
individuals is partly driven by the ever-growing reach and importance of the
beauty industry and a huge rise in cosmetic – now increasingly labelled
aesthetic – surgery.
These
trends are perhaps understandable given that those deemed to be “attractive”
benefit from a “beauty premium” whereby they are more likely to get a job, more
likely to get better pay and more likely to be promoted. Being deemed
unattractive or lacking the right dress sense can be reasons to be denied a
job, but they are not illegal.
Some
researchers have described an emerging aesthetic economy. Clearly this raises
concerns about unfair discrimination, but without the legal protection afforded
to, say, disabled people.
Not only
has this trend continued during the pandemic, it might even have been
compounded. With the first genuine signs of rising unemployment reported this
month, research already suggests a 14-fold increase in the number of applicants
for some job roles. For example, one restaurant in Manchester had over 1,000
applicants for a receptionist position, while the upmarket pub chain All Bar
One reported over 500 applicants for a single bar staff role in Liverpool.
Employers
are now clearly spoilt for choice when it comes to filling available positions,
and those perceived to be better looking will likely have a better chance. We
know from research by the University of Strathclyde’s Tom Baum and his
colleagues that the hospitality industry was precarious and exploitative enough
even before COVID.
It all
suggests that lookism is not going away. If we are to avoid the archaic
practices of the old normal permeating the new normal, it is time to rethink
what we expect from the workplace of the future. One obvious change that could
happen is making discrimination on the basis of looks illegal. That would
ensure that everyone, regardless of their appearance, has equal opportunity in
the world of work to come.
Lookism:
beauty still trumps brains in too many workplaces. By Christopher Warhurst and Dennis Nickson. . The Conversation, October 16, 2020.
It’s deep,
unconscious, and surprisingly universal—and means beautiful people get a much
better deal. But righting injustice isn’t easy when no one wants to call
themselves plain.
It’s not
your imagination: Life is good for beautiful people. A drumbeat of research
over the past decades has found that attractive people earn more than their
average-looking peers, are more likely to be given loans by banks, and are less
likely to be convicted by a jury. Voters prefer better-looking candidates;
students prefer better-looking professors, while teachers prefer better-looking
students. Mothers, those icons of blind love, have been shown to favor their
more attractive children.
Perhaps even
more discouragingly, we tend to assume that beautiful people are actually
better people—in realms that have nothing to do with physical beauty. Study
after study has shown that we judge attractive people to be healthier,
friendlier, more intelligent, and more competent than the rest of us, and we
use even the smallest differences in attractiveness to make these judgments. A
startling study published earlier this year found that even identical twins
judge each other by relative beauty: The more attractive twin assessed the
other as less athletic, less emotionally stable, and less socially competent.
The less attractive twins agreed, ranking their better-looking siblings ahead.
If even minute differences in attractiveness affect us so deeply and predictably,
the authors wrote, “the power of appearance-based stereotypes is greater than
any study has yet suggested.”
The
galloping injustice of “lookism” has not escaped psychologists, economists,
sociologists, and legal scholars. Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode’s
2010 book, “The Beauty Bias,” lamented “the injustice of appearance in life and
law,” while University of Texas, Austin economist Daniel Hamermesh’s 2011
“Beauty Pays,” recently out in paperback, traced the concrete benefits of
attractiveness, including a $230,000 lifetime earnings advantage over the
unattractive.
Still, the
issue has generated few serious solutions. Though to a surprising degree, we
agree on who is attractive and who isn’t, differences in looks remain largely
unmentionable, unlike divisions of race, gender, disability, sexual
orientation. There is no lobby for the homely. How do you change a
discriminatory behavior that, even though unfair, is obviously deep, hard to
pin down, and largely unconscious—and affects people who would be hurt even to
admit they’re in the stigmatized category?
Tentatively,
experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal
remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class,
creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured
but otherwise healthy people in personal-
injury
courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through
methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection.
There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned
consciousness-raising has a role to play, too.
None of
these approaches will be a panacea, and to some aesthetes among us, even trying
to counter the bias may sound ridiculous. But the reason to seek fairness for
the less glamorous isn’t just social or charitable. Our preference for
beautiful people makes us poor judges of qualities that have nothing to do with
physical appearance—it means that when we select employees, teachers, protégés,
borrowers, and even friends, we may not really be making the best choice. It’s
an embarrassing and stubborn truth—and the question is now whether, having
established it, social researchers can find a way to help us level the playing
field.
***
We remember
many great beauties of yore—Helen of
Troy, Alexander the Great—but great contributions of history have also come
from famously homely people. Socrates was considered ugly, with a pot belly and
snub nose; there was the ogre-like, lazy-eyed Sartre, and George Eliot, whom
Henry James called a “great horse-faced bluestocking.” Nathaniel Hawthorne
wrote that Abraham Lincoln was “about the homeliest man I ever saw.” Lincoln
himself joked often about his looks, replying to a debater who accused him of
being two-faced, “If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”
Yet the
more we know about our brains’ biases, the more remarkable it seems that these
plain folks achieved such prominence. Our preference for beauty “has existed
for a very long time,” said psychologist Nancy Etcoff, an assistant clinical
professor at Harvard Medical School whose 1999 book, “Survival of the
Prettiest,” defended beauty as empowering and universal. “It’s not a
20th-century phenomenon and not a Western phenomenon, but a human dilemma.”
As subjective
as “beauty” sounds, human beings agree to remarkable degree on who is
attractive and who is not. Beauty, as it turns out, is not in the eye of the
beholder. Generally, it means feminine features for women, like large eyes and
a round face, and masculine features for men, like a square jaw. Even newborn
infants have been shown to prefer gazing at faces adults agree are attractive.
“Friends might have an argument about who’s
more attractive, Brad Pitt or George Clooney, but both are going to say they’re
both attractive, and that both are more attractive than Steve Buscemi,” Connor
Principe, an assistant professor of psychology at Pacific University and the
lead author of the twin study, said. “We know who the attractive people are and
who the unattractive people are, and there’s a lot of agreement.” This is true
both within and across cultures, even those presumed to have radically
different standards of beauty.
In the
1990s, psychologists thought that beauty was merely facial symmetry. Today the
emerging consensus is more subtle: A beautiful face, it appears, is an
“average” face—one sheared of most idiosyncrasies, or what Principe calls the
most “face-like face.” One theory for why this would be is that it’s because
we’re able to recognize such faces a split second earlier, and we prefer images
we can process faster. “Instead of saying that someone who is beautiful is
‘easy on the eyes,’ we should say that they are ‘easy on the mind,’” Principe
explained in an e-mail. “Unfortunately for less attractive people, their
appearances make our brains work harder.”
The human
preference for attractiveness does seem to serve an evolutionary purpose.
Qualities like pink cheeks and facial symmetry are real indicators of health
and fertility—even more so before modern medicine and makeup—so it makes sense
that we’d be drawn to them. But we tend to extrapolate wildly on those meager
cues, and apply those extrapolations to a far wider group of scenarios than
mate selection. The “what is beautiful is good” bias, as psychologist Karen
Dion and colleagues called it in an influential 1972 paper, is an aspect of the
broader “halo effect.” Since humans have limited cognitive resources, we use
shortcuts, including taking something we know (Angelina is beautiful) and generalizing
about something we don’t yet know (Angelina is kind and competent).
Those
shared shortcuts, and our broad agreement on standards of beauty, are what give
the human beauty bias its shocking social power. And that’s not just bad for
the below-average; it raises the possibility that the next Abraham Lincoln or
George Eliot is going to be ignored. Just as American society is now benefiting
from previously untapped talents of minorities and women, it’s reasonable to
expect we are losing out because we—all of us—put too much stock in handsome
leaders and friends, and systematically underestimate the gifts of the plain.
***
How to fix this problem depends on what kind of problem,
exactly, you think it is. A number of scholars see it as fundamentally a civil-rights
issue, with the unattractive a class of people who are provably and
consistently discriminated against. It’s an idea that seems poised to resonate
beyond the academy: A 2004 survey conducted by an economist and a legal scholar
found more people reporting that they’d been discriminated against based on
their looks than on their ethnicity.
The
Constitution forbids employment discrimination on the basis of things like
race, sex, and religion, but only a few jurisdictions have tried to add
appearance to the list, starting with the parts of appearance you can measure.
The state of Michigan banned height and weight discrimination in 1977, and six
municipalities, including Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, have followed
suit with similar statutes. These laws haven’t led to a flood of frivolous
suits, as libertarians might fear—in fact, they haven’t led to many suits at
all, which suggests they aren’t doing much more than tackling the most
egregious cases. (Rhode’s book reports that in Michigan, an average of just one
case a year makes it to court.)
Even with
remarkable agreement on who is attractive and who is not, ugliness doesn’t feel
like the same kind of quality as race or sexuality. In an ideal world,
descriptors like “Asian” or “gay” are neutral, but “ugly” carries a universal
emotional charge. “There are no ‘unattractive’ lobbies,” Principe said. “Who is
going to fight for these people? For that to really work, you have to have
people who are willing to be recognized as unattractive, and that’s going to be
the hardest thing.” Who’s going to lead the way in the Ugly Pride parade? It’s
hard to imagine it will be easy to find volunteers.
Hamermesh,
however, thinks some people might raise their hands. He points out that when
people rank photographs on a 5 to 1 scale of attractiveness—the most common
method in beauty research—only 1 or 2 percent end up labeled “1,” and there’s a
strong consensus about who belongs at the low end of the scale. “I would bet
these people already feel themselves disadvantaged, are aware that their looks
disadvantage them, and will be pleased to have some protection,” he said.
Other
ideas, based on traditional legal and economic remedies for unfairness, can
seem a bit utopian (or Orwellian): Hamermesh has proposed “affirmative-action
programs for the ugly,” or extending the Americans with Disabilities Act to
include the unattractive. But without a broad public understanding of the
concrete disadvantages of unattractiveness, these ideas sound to many critics
like social engineering run amok.
Recognizing
our beauty bias as a cognitive problem offers a different kind of traction: For
one thing, it’s possible to set up evaluation methods in the workplace that
ignore differences in physical beauty. The field of industrial psychology has developed
a set of best practices for businesses that want to avoid discrimination in
hiring, including the use of online or standardized interviews that remove an
interviewer’s unreliable gut instincts from the equation. Other best practices
include scoring interview answers numerically, and committing to ask every
candidate the exact same set of questions, since subtle bias often appears in
the form of extra follow-up questions. (Of course, shifting the hiring process
online isn’t foolproof: A 2012 study found people said online interviewees with
attractive avatars deserved higher salaries.) The more systematic approach can
produce interviews that feel “less like a conversation and more like a test,”
said Tara Behrend, lead author of the avatar study and an assistant professor
of organizational sciences at George Washington University. “But that means
there’s less opportunity for bias.”
***
There will be resistance , obviously, to changing the status quo to account for our bias toward beauty. A few industries have made an open case for hiring attractive employees. If customers or clients are attracted to beautiful people, they point out, then it’s perfectly rational to hire them, particularly for sales or front-office positions.
But that
kind of pragmatism doesn’t hold water for many advocates. “To say that hiring
salespeople who are attractive is good for business is the same argument whites
made for hiring whites only during the early civil rights era,” Rhode pointed
out. The law no longer allows airlines to cater to the preferences of male
business travelers with all-female steward staff, for example, so why is
looks-based discrimination acceptable just because customers may prefer it?
Moreover,
it’s clear that we trust beauty beyond the realms in which it actually makes a
difference. Beautiful people may be likelier to receive loans and receive lower
interest rates, but research says they’re just as likely to default. That alone
suggests there are areas where more objective kinds of evaluation would be helpful.
One means
of attack is perhaps the simplest of all: There’s a chance that merely making
us aware of the bias can help diffuse it, by allowing us to remind ourselves
that we’re wrong if we assume that beautiful and good are one and the same.
Etcoff also notes that prolonged exposure to media images skews our brain’s
notion of that “average” face: In a plugged-in era in which I see Jennifer
Lawrence’s face more than my own sister’s, my brain’s concept of “average” is
skewed wildly far from reality. It’s up to us to put down the magazines.
Research on
how to prime ourselves to overcome this bias is still in its infancy, but
Principe says there are promising hints from the more robust research on racism
that bad cognitive habits can be broken. A paper published last year in the
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed how researchers at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison devised a “habit-breaking intervention” that
included teaching subjects to recognize their own responses and adopting the
stigmatized person’s perspective. The intervention drastically reduced
subjects’ racial biases, even months later.
So if we’re
ever going to break our addiction to beauty, perhaps the first step is to admit
we have a problem. “We do ourselves a disservice by saying looks don’t matter
in society,” Principe said. “We’re told it’s what’s on the inside that matters,
and to never judge a book by its cover. That’s counterproductive. We need to
say, Looks do matter.”
Who will
fight the beauty bias? By Ruth Graham. The Boston Globe, August 23, 2013.
