Good-looking people are also generally credited with having more positive personalities—but researchers have shown that this is not the case for beautiful women in professional life, especially when they are applying for managerial positions with major organizations.
Whereas attractiveness consistently proved to provide an advantage for male applicants seeking white-collar organizational positions, it was an advantage for female applicants only when the position was a nonmanagerial one.” Thus, according to the researchers, there is a distinct tendency for attractiveness to work against female applicants for managerial positions.
In a 2019 study, Leah D. Sheppard (Washington State University) and Stefanie K. Johnson (University of Colorado Boulder) also concluded that for women in business, beauty is a liability. They conducted six different experiments to test whether people are predisposed to trust highly-attractive rather than less-attractive female company leaders when they announce positive or negative organizational news. But no matter what the news was, the female beauty penalty persists. The female researchers called this the “femme fatal effect.” Employing a series of different experiments, they then sought to demonstrate that the real reason for such discrimination was, “that attractive woman could often elicit sexual jealousy among those who regard them, even in the context of the workplace, which could then have negative implications for their perceived truthfulness and trustworthiness.” This could, they suggest, fuel suspicions that a beautiful woman could use her sexual attractiveness to gain career advantages that are not based on her performance.
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