Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed by Zachary Crockett Page B

jobs considered “masculine,”
such as mechanical engineer, construction supervisor, and even director of
finance, women actually paid a penalty for being attractive.
    A separate experiment that sent out identical applications with
and without pictures, however, found that attractive women fared worse than
“plain-looking” women regardless of industry. But it theorized that attractive
women faced a penalty because human resources offices are
staffed mainly by women . If a mostly male or evenly balanced staff
reviewed the applications, attractive women may have enjoyed an advantage.
    Results like this suggest that women may not benefit from
attractiveness as much as men, or may even suffer reverse appearance-based
discrimination depending on the circumstances.

 
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    While
it’s not the subject of congressional committees and headline news, some debate
exists over whether appearance-based hiring policies should be considered
discrimination, effectively offering unattractive people similar protections to
those that exist for women, minorities, senior citizens, and the disabled.
Without equating the disadvantages faced by plain-looking people to the
injustices minorities face, advocates insist that this would also seek a
society that is merit-based and where people are not limited by physical
appearance.
    Many people despise Abercrombie & Fitch for hiring only
good-looking staff, but Harvard economist Robert Barro argues that good looks are a legitimate aspect of productive economic activity.
“A worker’s physical appearance, to the extent that it is valued by customers
and co-workers,” he writes in an editorial, “is as legitimate a job
qualification as intelligence, dexterity, job experience, and personality.”
Intelligence is doled out unequally and determines which jobs people can and
cannot get, yet we do not ask the government to intervene.
    The two sides argue over other practical issues: Could the
government accurately judge when attractiveness is irrelevant to a job? Would
legal protection unleash a wave frivolous lawsuits ?
More importantly, critics point out that unattractive individuals have not been
discriminated against historically the way that minorities and women have
— a justification for legal intervention. Yet just as legislation aims to
protect women, minorities, and the elderly from the consequences of irrational
biases — women can’t be good executives, for example, or black men and
women are less intelligent — unattractive people are constantly on the
losing side of irrational biases.
    Company policies that favor attractive staff may seem defensible
for jobs where the halo effect means that a worker’s looks will benefit the
business. But companies seem to favor attractive employees even when looks are
irrelevant.
    In an experiment run by Harvard and Wesleyan professors, for
example, participants performed a task in which beauty was of no help. Other
participants acted as their bosses and set their compensation — either
blindly or while aware of their attractiveness. Mirroring real world findings,
attractive participants earned wages 12% to 17% higher. Yet, as the researchers
wrote, the lion’s share of the wage gap was explained by how “employers
(wrongly) expect good-looking workers to perform better than their less
attractive counterparts.” This suggests that attractive people enjoy advantages
even in fields like software engineering or corporate management where their
looks don’t benefit the business.
    Beauty is just as irrationally beneficial in the supposedly
egalitarian setting of a courtroom. Researchers tracking the outcomes of court
cases find that attractive (and guilty) defendants receive lighter sentences.
In another experiment where participants decided how much money to award the
victim of a negligence case, they awarded the victim almost twice as much if he
or she was more attractive than the defendant. Justice is not blind.
    In stories,