We often hear of how beautiful people seem to get all the breaks — first through the door at nightclubs, being chosen to be on a team or as a friend based upon looks alone, even getting a date just because of your physical beauty. But as previous research has shown, sometimes being beautiful can put a person at greater risk while they try and attain an ideal of beauty that doesn’t exist.
Now new research suggests another barrier faced by some of the beautiful people — applying for a job. In the study, attractive women were discriminated against when applying for jobs considered “masculine” and for which appearance was not seen as important to the job. Such positions included job titles like manager of research and development, director of finance, mechanical engineer and construction supervisor.
Should we feel sorry for these beautiful people?
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that is why attractive women now a days sell sex on the web, are strippers, escorts and do porn
LMFAO!
This is also in response to Leo’s comment. I “ha” at your comment because I’m beautiful
and I’m a midwife. ha.
This reminds me of the shameful practice of many colleges 50 years ago, when they required all students to submit a photo with their application for admission. The result was that my freshman class at Duke University in 1961 had no black undergraduates. Sometimes appearance is indeed used to discriminate in very bad ways.
Excellent critique. So much peer-reviewed research gets reported in popular press without examination of the methodology. Only by looking at how a study was conducted can you know what it says. (Another pet peeve of mine is that the strength of response is seldom critically evaluated, beyond the weak criterion of statistical significance. This is especially a problem with drug studies.) It sounds, as you imply, like the only valid conclusion in this case is that people will use whatever information they have in preference to random sorting.
Maybe sometimes, we used to evaluate an individual whole personality towards work by looking at his/her physical appearance. It is really other way of discriminating people in a reverse way, for example beautiful women are given low-positioned job because they seemed to have great beauties but low quality towards work.
This article makes good points, but it ignores the idea of “beauty” that comes into play for men, too.
I work primarily with gay men in Los Angeles, and many actors/models, and both gay male culture and Los Angeles culture in general “demands” beauty for success in many ways — not just in front of the camera, but anywhere around or near one.
New York and Miami are reportedly somewhat this way, too.
“Beautiful People” do have their burdens, as I’ve seen in their therapy, but I still say it’s a “nice problem to have”, as the advantages are indeed real, and the disadvantages are generally things they can cope with.
This is in response to Leo’s comment. Leo, you are making a huge generalization about beautiful women; not all beautiful women “sell sex on the web, are strippers, escorts and do porn.” Not one woman is exactly like any other, so don’t make generalizations unless you’re acquainted with every single beautiful woman in the world (which isn’t possible).
I have just finished reading many pages of study about jobs,gender and money. I am afraid that so many of our studies are like this…take a bunch of college sophomores and ask them what they would do if faced with a decisions,etc. Then a conclusion is reached that the media picks up..hey, these subjects have no experience whatsoever in the work world, are not hiring managers and are not making any selections. Time for some new research methodologies.