The paradox of beauty being all important for women to pursue while also making them untrustworthy at work is hard to swallow.
I came across an article in the Harvard Business Review recently that caught my attention. Ania G. Wieckowsli’s piece, For Women in Business, Beauty is a Liability. The author refers to the research of Leah D. Sheppard and Stefanie K. Johnson that found that “beautiful women were perceived to be less truthful, less trustworthy as leaders, and more deserving of termination than their ordinary-looking female counterparts.” And there was almost no change in people’s responses to the attractiveness of men.
This research underlines yet another double bind that exists for women at work, and we need to talk about it. Existing research points to attractiveness in women being correlated to other aspects of life success (more likely to partner, more attention in school) and when it comes to social bias, beauty in women is driven home as THE most important aspect of ourselves. So, the double bind lies in this message: attractiveness matters more than anything if you are a woman, but don’t be TOO attractive because it will make you seem untrustworthy at work .
Darn it, what’s a woman to do then?
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