Slate's Bizbox
everyday economics: How the dismal science applies to your life.

Hey, Gorgeous, Here's a Raise!As for you fatties, we're cutting your salaries.

By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Monday, July 9, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET
Illustration by Robert Neubecker

"I know what wages beauty gives," said the poet William Butler Yeats about a century ago. Modern econometricians know more precisely. In their published research, Professors Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle estimate that if you're perceived as beautiful, you probably earn about 5 percent more than your ordinary-looking counterparts.

As beauty is rewarded, so ugliness is penalized. Ugly women earn about 5 percent less than other women, and ugly men earn about 10 percent less than other men. That's right; the market punishes men more than women for being unattractive. Moreover, men's looks haunt them at every stage of their careers: Better-looking men get more job offers, higher starting salaries, and better raises. For women, good looks will get you better raises but usually not better job offers or starting salaries. (A note on Hamermesh and Biddle's methodology: Beauty was assessed by panels of people who judged photographs of the study's subjects.)

But while men suffer more for being ugly, women—and specifically white women—suffer more for being fat. In a paper from last year, Professor John Cawley found that an extra 65 pounds typically cost a white woman 7 percent of her wages. To put this another way, if you're a seriously overweight white woman, losing 65 pounds is likely to be as lucrative as an extra year of college or three extra years of work experience. For men and for black women, weight has no effect on wages. (The people in Cawley's study self-reported their weights.)

Since beauty and slenderness are associated with good pay, we can ask which way the causality runs. Do some people look better because they earn more, or do they earn more because they look better?

Surely to some extent money buys beauty. The more you earn, the more you can spend on cosmetics, health care, and plastic surgery. And higher earnings can lead to higher self-esteem, which in turn leads to better eating habits. But Hamermesh, Biddle, and Cawley believe these effects are small, for several reasons. First, there's a limit to how much you can accomplish with cosmetics. Second, the correlation between wages and beauty is strongest among the young, who are the least likely to have benefited from health care and plastic surgery. And finally, Cawley has devised some subtle statistical tests that tend to rule out the "high wages cause self-esteem which causes better eating" theory.

Illustration by Robert Neubecker

If high wages don't cause beauty, then presumably beauty causes high wages. But why? One guess is that certain high-paying occupations (like "fashion model" or "romantic lead") are closed to all but the most beautiful. But that can't explain why beautiful auto mechanics earn more than plain-looking auto mechanics, beautiful teachers earn more than plain-looking teachers, and so on through a long list of occupations.

Well, then, why do employers pay more for beautiful workers? Is it just because beautiful workers are more fun to look at, or does their beauty make them more productive—say by breeding self-confidence or by attracting customers? (My boon companion Marian Heller points out that self-confidence can pay off in another way—by fostering the courage to seek better jobs and demand better raises.)

Here's some evidence that employers like beauty not for its own sake, but because it's productive: Beautiful people are more likely to be found in occupations where you'd expect beauty to matter—retail sales, waitressing, etc. If the beauty premium were generated strictly by employers' desire to look at pretty people, it would presumably draw beautiful people equally into all occupations.

Now back to the gender gap. Why do ugly men suffer more than ugly women in the labor market? Partly it's because many of the ugliest women opt out of the labor market altogether, so they aren't counted in the statistics. In fact, the ugliest married women (the ones who are rated in the lowest 6 percent lookswise) are 8 percent less likely to look for a job than married women in general. That's a pretty big effect, but Hamermesh and Biddle conclude that it doesn't come close to explaining the gender gap, which remains a bit of a mystery.

They do point out, though, that low wages are not the only penalty for bad looks, and some of the other penalties hit women a lot harder than they hit men. Ugly women tend to attract the lowest quality husbands (as measured by educational achievement or earnings potential). The effect is not symmetric, though: Beautiful women do no better on the marriage market than average women. For men, looks don't seem to affect marriage prospects at all.

Why does beauty rule the wage market? Why does the market punish fat, except when it doesn't? There's a lot we don't understand. If you've got a theory that I haven't explored here, send me e-mail, and I'll discuss the best ideas in an upcoming column.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Steven E. Landsburg is the author, most recently, of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics. You can e-mail him at .
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:





[Notes from the Fray Editor: Several posters made similar points to Mr Mendiola's, below: a lot fewer had the cynical but strangely convincing honesty of Andrea's post. Do juries like pretty people, and what can lawyers do about it? Read this post here. Brad wants to tax fat people: off the point slightly, but the idea certainly got The Fray going. Suzanne Conaway says that short people are discriminated against, too.

7/12: We have finally reached the levels of a metaFray. We are re-opening the Fray Notes to incorporate Ferdinanda's take on the featured posts, and because we feel the term "high-maintenance poodle bitch" deserves the widest possible audience.]





It makes more sense to say that an individual's self-confidence make a better person thereby making them more productive and reliable in many ways. This is most evident when the person's career ladder requires more use of social and communication skills as he/she moves up.



If a software developer moves up the ranks to an analyst, consultant, manager and later the vice president of an IT department in one year, then the most likely reason for that person's success is how well he/she can confidently socialize and communicate ideas or information to colleagues, executives and clients. And no book says that you have to be beautiful to achieve just that.



Personality, on the other hand, overrides everything else. With good (read: socially and culturally acceptable) personality there is charm, there is health and there is positive energy. The overall positiveness makes a person more reliable, efficient and productive. Needless to say, good personality is contagious and everyone may notice--including your boss. You don't have to be beautiful to have a good personality. You just have to know the values you need to live by. And in most cases, whether you're racing the career ladder or not, your success is measured on how much (higher wage or more friends) you win along the way.



--Edmund D. Mendiola



(To reply, click here.)





Beauty may very well be skin deep and one's true self may be what ultimately matters once given a chance to shine through, but the fact of the matter is that those empty platitudes are a first-line defense against the kind of uniform cultural bias discussed in this article and nothing more. In other words, they are what you tell little kids in hopes that they will mimic and parrot you and grow up believing that. There comes a point in nearly everyone's life, however, that the feebleness of those chirpy sayings becomes clear: perhaps it is the first time a cuter peer wins the affections of a crush, perhaps it is a failed audition for a school play. For many people, though, the bias manifests itself less obviously in the workplace…



Those of you [in The Fray] who are angry, your anger is misplaced. Keep repeating your petty mantras and in the meantime keep at least one "beauty-beholding" eye open to this particular brand of nonsense swirling around you. And to the particularly litigious fella who wants to prosecute these employers: that'd be one hell of a big class-action suit, and you'd better hire one good-looking lawyer--because courtrooms are one place where this bias is especially rampant.



This issue isn't nearly as alarming as the idea of how many borderline-intelligent people are out there, raising their fists against cultural awareness because it clashes with their idealized nursery-rhyme picture of the world.



--Andrea



(To reply, click here.)



(7/11)



Mendiola vs Andrea mirrors the point of Landsburg's article. Men (I think this poster was male) know the value of a good personality because women are more likely to consider factors other than looks when rating attractiveness. (And yes, we could have a long conversation about whether those other factors boil down to money, but I digress.)



Women learn that attractiveness is much more socially valuable than their brains, characters, or kind hearts will ever be, to most men. This is what makes us so cynical about them, and less than sympathetic when it turns out that Miss Gorgeous is a high-maintenance poodle bitch…



--Ferdinanda



(To reply, click here.)



(7/12)





Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Topic A: Obama's Speech
| Pundits and diplomats respond.
Robinson: Sunshine in BerlinToles: Obama the UniterTelnaes: Meanwhile, McCain
PLUS » Stumped: Bring Back Bill Clinton