It’s an outdated saying that women advance in the workplace based solely on their looks. And perhaps a new study will disprove this notion.
A new study has found that men actually benefit more from being physically attractive in school and the workplace than women.
Researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences examined data from over 11,000 Americans over the age of 20 from adolescence to adulthood, including ratings of their appearance, information about their educational and career success, and their income.
They found that people who were rated as more attractive at age 15 were more likely to surpass their parents in income and achievement by the time they reached age 30. This effect was significantly stronger for men than for women, particularly in the education sector.
If you are attractive, you have a better chance of surpassing your parents in many ways: in education, at work, and in earnings. This effect applies to everyone, but the results are particularly pronounced in men
Experts have argued that from an evolutionary perspective, attractive appearance can be a sign that someone is a suitable, fit and disease-free partner.
And what’s more, people tend to rate conventionally attractive people as more intelligent, trustworthy, and talented.
In the new study, researchers wanted to examine the material impact of these perceived biases.
To do this, they used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health for short), a long-term study that followed around 20,000 people from adolescence to adulthood. Some dropped out over time, so the new study includes data from 11,583 people.
These numbers include physical health data, demographic information, socioeconomic data and, oddly enough, physical attractiveness ratings.
Every few years, study participants came by to answer questions for Add Health.
At each visit, interviewers were asked to rate participants on their attractiveness—a five-point scale ranging from “very unattractive” to “very attractive.”
The interviewers were not given specific instructions about the criteria by which they should evaluate the participants. However, because studies have shown that multiple observers agree when rating a person’s attractiveness, Add Health’s ratings are likely to give an accurate picture of how people view each volunteer.
The team behind the study looked at how interviewers rated participants’ appearance when they first arrived as teenagers and how their lives had evolved some 20 years later.
Physical attractiveness at age 15 made a significant difference 20 years later, even after researchers took into account other factors known to affect a person’s socioeconomic status – things like childhood health, conditions in the Neighborhood and parents’ socioeconomic position.
This research aimed to examine how a person’s aesthetic attractiveness affects their upward mobility. Theoretically, however, the opposite effect is possible, wrote the authors of the study: upward social mobility could lead to greater attractiveness.
Researchers compared people’s attractiveness as teenagers to their success as adults. On the one hand, this helps ensure that the results achieved are based on a person’s natural appearance and not the effects of wealth, such as plastic surgery. On the other hand, measuring someone’s attractiveness as a teenager may not provide an accurate measure of what they will look like as an adult
Once someone becomes rich, they can afford nicer clothes, a gym membership, or even cosmetic surgery to increase their physical attractiveness.
For this reason, they focused on assessing physical attractiveness at age 15.
While earning money in adulthood can cause your hair, face, and body to become hotter in adulthood, money has no effect on a person’s youthful appearance. By limiting assessments of physical attractiveness to adolescence, researchers could be fairly certain that it affected social mobility, rather than the other way around.
The results appeared this month in the journal Social Science Quarterly.
Breaking down the impact of these scientific hotness ratings by gender revealed one particular effect: Men seemed to benefit more when people thought they looked good.
“For men, we observe a social mobility gradient of physical attractiveness for all three mobility measures; “This means that those who are rated as attractive have higher mobility chances than those who are rated as average,” write the authors of the study.
And with each step up the “ladder of attractiveness,” men tended to increase this advantage.
“For women, the gradient in terms of intergenerational educational and income mobility is weaker, and there are no significant differences in the categories of physical attractiveness with regard to occupational mobility.”
The new findings contradict a 2013 study from Scotland that found the attractiveness of teenage girls was an important factor influencing educational outcomes.
A key limitation of this study, which the team acknowledges, is that they first assessed people’s appearance.
For example, someone who is considered unattractive as a teenager may flourish later in life.
Of course, this work is just one data point in the picture of how attractively people get along in the world. The study authors note that the specific measures they use to measure performance could play a role in the results.
They also note that the observed differences are more complicated than just “attractive” versus “unattractive.” People who were rated as “very unattractive” performed worse than those who were rated simply as “unattractive.” Therefore, future researchers should note that these categories should not be merged.