The well-known positive wage effect of physical attractiveness may have more to do with employers’ beliefs about good-looking people’s workplace advantages than simple bias toward beauty, say Tatyana Deryugina of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Olga Shurchkov of Wellesley College. In an experiment, they found that when the work involved a bargaining task, a 1-standard-deviation increase in worker attractiveness was associated with a 26.5% increase in employers’ wage offers; yet there was no such effect when the work involved data analysis or data entry. The discriminatory “beauty premium” can be explained by employers’ belief that attractive people do better in face-to-face work, the researchers say.
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