| ashu |
Posted
on 05-Jan-01 09:35 PM
All things being equal, do good-looking people
EARN more?
In light of a recent discussion on this Web site
re: beauty contests, this article from the New York
Times may provide a different perspective to us all.
Enjoy!!
oohi
ashu
***********
Economic Scene: Like It or Not, Appearance Counts in
the Workplace
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/28/business/28SCEN.html
December 28, 2000
By VIRGINIA POSTREL
FROM Al Gore's earth-tone suits to Katherine Harris's
makeup to
George W. Bush's post-election boil, the 2000
presidential race was
filled with commentary on how the players looked. For
the first
time, the Gallup Organization even polled people on
which candidate
was better-looking. (Mr. Gore beat Mr. Bush, 44
percent to 24
percent.) The question was worth asking because the
answer was not
obvious. Both candidates were way above average.
Critics bemoan the emphasis on the way candidates
look as a
perverse product of media-oriented campaigns. But even
in jobs
where no TV time is required, the good-looking have a
competitive
edge. And, contrary to popular belief, the economic
rewards for
beauty are greater for men than for women.
That is what two economists Daniel S. Hamermesh of
the
University of Texas at Austin and Jeff E. Biddle of
Michigan State
University found in a 1994 analysis of data from
surveys of
thousands of United States and Canadian households.
Other factors being equal, the unfortunate 9 percent
of working
men whom interviewers classified as "below average" or
downright
"homely" made 9 percent less in hourly earnings than
did more
attractive men. By contrast, the 32 percent of men
classified as
"above average" or "handsome" got a wage premium of 5
percent.
Women took a 5 percent hit for bad looks and earned a
4 percent
premium for beauty.
This does not mean the ugly are doomed to poverty,
since other
factors matter a lot in determining income. The
difference between
the bottom and top categories, Professor Hamermesh
said, "is
equivalent to about a year and a half, maybe a bit
less, of extra
schooling; that's not small, it's not big."
What interests him is why beauty reaps rewards. Are
employers just
indulging their taste for good-looking associates? Or
is there
something about good-looking people that makes them
more valuable
to their companies?
To tease out more specifics about how beauty works in
the labor
market, in a 1998 paper Professors Hamermesh and
Biddle looked at a
more homogeneous group of workers: lawyers who
graduated from the
same law school. The school provided photos of the
students, their
class rank and law- review status, data on their
earnings a year, 5
years and 15 years after graduating, and information
about the
nature of their practices. The economists then had
each photo rated
by a panel of four a man and a woman under 35 and a
man and a
woman over 35 with a score of five meaning
"strikingly handsome
or beautiful" and a score of one meaning "homely, far
below average
in attractiveness."
Again, Professors Hamermesh and Biddle found that
better-looking
lawyers made more money, especially as their careers
progressed.
Fifteen years after graduating, they noted,
"better-looking
midcareer attorneys were billing at higher rates, not
just billing
more hours."
Within this general pattern, Professors Hamermesh and
Biddle
looked for differences between subgroups that might
indicate why
better-looking lawyers earned more. If, for instance,
law firm
partners simply discriminated to suit their own
tastes, then
self-employed lawyers should be immune from the
economic effects of
their looks. But, the economists found, "if anything,
beauty pays
off more for self-employed junior attorneys than for
employees."
That suggests that clients, not hiring firms, make
the
difference.
To test that idea, the economists looked at the
difference between
private-sector lawyers, who have to woo clients, and
public- sector
lawyers, who do not. The results were striking. The
private sector
not only drew more attractive lawyers to start, but
the looks gap
grew over time.
Good-looking government lawyers tended to switch to
private firms,
while less-attractive lawyers moved from law firms to
government
jobs.
Good-looking people "will go into fields where their
beauty is
more important," Professor Hamermesh said. "They'll
switch to those
areas where the payoff is greater." The higher payoff
to good
looks, he emphasizes, comes from "consumer
discrimination," not
employer tastes.
That payoff appears to be an international
phenomenon. A 1997
study by Professors Hamermesh and Biddle and two Dutch
economists,
Ciska Bosman and Gerard Pfann, found that Dutch
advertising
agencies with good-looking executives had higher
revenues and
faster growth than their competitors had. So
attractive executives
were not just an office amenity; they were actually
more
economically productive.
And in a 1999 paper, Professor Hamermesh, Xin Meng of
the
Australian National University and Junsen Zhang of the
Chinese
University of Hong Kong found that in Shanghai women
in the top 35
percent in terms of looks earned about 10 percent more
than women
with average or below average looks, other factors
being equal. The
Shanghai study, "Dress for Success Does Primping
Pay?" added
another element to the economics of beauty: the return
on spending
for clothes and cosmetics. (This unpublished paper is
available at
www .eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Hamermesh. Versions of the
others are
available at the National Bureau of Economic Research
site at
www.nber.org.)
The economists found that beauty spending did
increase earnings
slightly, but by no more than 5 percent of what women
spent on
clothes and cosmetics. Makeup and new clothes were not
investments;
they were consumption. "You're not dressing for
success," Professor
Hamermesh said. "You're dressing to make yourself
happier."
It is tough to admit that something as superficial
and preordained
as personal beauty could be genuinely valuable in the
marketplace.
But the rewards for good looks are too pervasive to
blame
mean-spirited employers.
"All of our discrimination policies are based on the
employer, yet
the evidence we have says that there are these wage
differentials,
they seem persistent, they seem consistent with any
kind of theory,
and all the evidence points to them being caused by
the way
consumers feel," Professor Hamermesh said. "In other
words, the
problem is all of us."
Or perhaps it is no problem at all. Instead of
treating beauty
like race as a suspect category irrelevant to job
performance
maybe we should think of it more like intelligence,
charm or
musical aptitude. Some people are lucky enough to have
it, while
others have to cultivate other gifts. And we would all
rather enjoy
the good looks of others than do without them.
The New York Times on the Web
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