Imagine if a male boss were to fire a female employee for being “too attractive,” suggesting that she had become a distraction at work. This was the subject of a 2013 lawsuit where dental hygienist, Melissa Nelson, sued her boss, Dr. James Knight for just this reason. The case made it all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court where Dr. Knight was found not-guilty of discrimination. When it comes to attractiveness, most people believe that attractive women have it made. But there are instances where attractiveness can elicit negative views of women like snobbery, dishonesty, promiscuity, vanity, and sexual disloyalty. In fact, the “seductress” – a highly feminine woman whose sex appeal infuses the workplace with sexual jealousy and competition, is a common stereotype of women in the workplace.

Based on these negative stereotypes, we proposed that attractive women, in addition to being seen as less competent, might also be seen as less trustworthy. In a recently published study (linked here), we termed this as the femme fatale effect. Our findings showed that attractive businesswomen are seen as less trustworthy, less truthful and more worthy of being fired than less attractive women. We argue that this lack of trust taps into unconscious feelings of sexual insecurity, jealousy and fear among both men and women. Importantly, we do not suggest that attractive women are in any way less trustworthy – but we sought to uncover a subtle form of gender bias against women.


We demonstrated the femme fatale effect in six separate studies using images drawn from a Google images search for a “professional woman” and had participants in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing platform, as well as undergraduate students participate in an experiment. In our first study, both the target’s position (i.e., senior executive) and industry (i.e., manufacturing) were masculine and we used both attractive and unattractive photos of men and women. In the second study we still used attractive and unattractive photos of men and women but we changed the job to be a more feminine job (public relations). In the third study we used both a feminine industry (nursing) and a feminine job (public relations) and we no longer included male stimuli.


Comparing masculine and feminine roles was important because past research, including some of our own work, has explained bias against attractive women to be the result of a perceived lack of fit between the view that attractive women are feminine, and feminine women are less competent in masculine roles. By showing the femme fatale effect in both masculine and feminine roles and jobs, we show that there is more at play than just a perceived lack of fit between the job role and women’s femininity. Importantly, we did not find that attractive men were seen as untrustworthy.

In the fifth study we switched from delivering bad news to delivering good news and the results still persisted. In addition, in the final 2 studies we added another manipulation. Specifically, we used primed tried to alter participants’ feelings of sexual insecurity to isolate whether this would change the femme fatale effect. Some participants were asked to think and write about a time when they felt secure in a relationship and certain that their romantic partner “was faithful and committed to them alone.” Feeling sexually secure mitigated the femme fatale effect, causing the attractive women to be seen as equally truthful to the unattractive women. In the final study we further found that those who were primed to feel sexually insecure viewed the attractive women as less truthful, and therefore more deserving of termination. In both cases, feeling sexually secure (but not generally secure) mitigated the femme fatale effect. Attractive women were no longer viewed as less trustworthy by participants who felt sexually secure, suggesting that at least some of the effect is rooted in sexual insecurity.


A potential limitation of our research is that all of the studies involved experimental manipulations using fictitious situations with strangers. As we get to know people more personally, the impact of their attractiveness on the way we see them should be diminished as we gain more insight into their behavior. Being dishonest and untrustworthy should certainly have a greater effect on how we view someone than their looks alone. Thus, we primarily demonstrate what can happen, and how first impressions might be formed, but we do not test the extent to which the phenomenon actually occurs.


When one considers the cultural depiction of beautiful women, it is not terribly surprising that attractive women engender distrust. Sirens, depicted in Greek mythology, are seductive female creatures that lure sailors to steer their boats into jagged rocks with their beauty and the sweetness of their song. In Georges Bizet’s opera, Carmen, Don Jose sacrifices everything, including his childhood sweetheart and his station in the military, to win the heart of a beautiful woman named, Carmen who leaves him for another man. Our studies extend this effect to the business setting, supporting the idea that women can be too pretty to best trusted.


So what can we do with this information? We know that attractiveness can be judged in just a few milliseconds and activates the parts of the brain associated with emotion and threat. And we presume that these effects are operating at an unconscious level. People might know that they don’t trust an attractive woman, but they cannot quite put their finger on why that would be the case. Given how automatically attractiveness stereotypes are elicited, is it possible to mitigate the femme fatale effect? Our only advice is that now we know that people unfairly mistrust the attractive, we can actively work to interrupt the unconscious process by using our awareness of why this happens to avoid it.