Almost everyone likes beautiful women colleagues in the workplace, but a new study claims that attractive females often face discrimination when it comes to grabbing certain kinds of jobs. In their study, researchers at Colorado University found that 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, the study found.
“In these professions being attractive was highly detrimental to women. In every other kind of job, attractive women were preferred. This wasn’t the case with men which shows that there is still a double standard when it comes to gender,” Stefanie Johnson, who led the study, said. The study, co-authored by Prof. Robert Dipboye of the University of Central Florida, found that attractive men, however, suffered no similar discrimination and were always at an advantage. According to Johnson, beautiful people still enjoy a significant edge. They tend to get higher salaries, better performance evaluations, higher levels of admission to college, better voter ratings when running for public office and more favourable judgments in trials.
“We found that attractiveness is beneficial for men and women applying for most jobs, in terms of ratings of employment suitability. However, attractiveness was more beneficial for women applying for feminine sex-typed jobs than masculine sex-typed jobs,” he said.
In one of the two experiments in the study, subjects were given a list of jobs and photos of applicants and told to sort them according to their suitability for the job. They had a stack of 55 male and 55 female photos. In job categories like director of security, hardware salesperson, prison guard and tow truck driver, attractive women were overlooked. —PTI