Now I am on record right now as acknowledging that this topic is the deep end of the pool, but, nonetheless, I am wading in carefully, and wearing hip boots.
It is well known that handsome, tall men earn more, are promoted more, are believed to be smarter and so on — regardless of their actual accomplishments. They get a benefit based on their appearance. So, do attractive women get the same benefit? It turns out the answer is no. To support this, I am turning to Leah Sheppard, an assistant professor at Washington State University, who has recently published “For Women in Business, Beauty is a Liability.”
Sheppard and her co-author, Stefanie Johnson, associate professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, set up an experiment. The premise was that a company was making layoffs “because of economic conditions.” They collected pictures of men and women in various categories of “attractiveness,” and they then showed these pictures to participants who were being terminated.
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