Would You Hire A Dumb Blonde?!

From Freak­ing News​.Com

From a BNET arti­cle by Jes­sica Still­man.

Should You Hire the More Beau­ti­ful Can­di­date?
Jes­sica Stillman

Beauty and busi­ness are not nec­es­sar­ily top­ics you’d think of as going together, but most of us have heard of stud­ies link­ing good looks and career advance­ment. It cer­tainly doesn’t seem fair, but is it true? In a strange choice of Christ­mas spe­cial, the Econ­o­mist recently took a look at the issue. Not known for its sen­sa­tion­al­ist report­ing, the mag­a­zine nonethe­less came up with some pretty star­tling (and dis­il­lu­sion­ing) con­clu­sions. Among their most galling find­ings: dumb blond jokes aside, beauty is actu­ally cor­re­lated with intelligence.

The Econ­o­mist cites a study by Dr. Daniel Hamer­mesh of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas:

The accu­mu­lat­ing evi­dence sug­gests that phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics do give clues about intel­li­gence, that such clues are picked up by other peo­ple, and that these clues are also asso­ci­ated with beauty. And other work also sug­gests that this really does mat­ter…. [Dr Hamer­mesh] has col­lected evi­dence from more than one con­ti­nent that beauty really is asso­ci­ated with success—at least, with finan­cial suc­cess. He has also shown that, if all else is equal, it might be a per­fectly legit­i­mate busi­ness strat­egy to hire the more beau­ti­ful candidate.

Even more unfairly, Dr Hamer­mesh found evi­dence that beau­ti­ful peo­ple may bring more rev­enue to their employ­ers than the less-favored do.

Beauty may mat­ter for busi­ness, but can’t the less nat­u­rally graced make up for biol­ogy with a lit­tle effort and a credit card? Dr. Hamer­mesh, unfor­tu­nately, dashed that hope as well.

Can you really fake the unfake­able sig­nal? Dr Hamermesh’s research sug­gests that you can but, sadly, that it is not cost-effective—at least, not if your pur­pose is career advance­ment… he looked at how women’s spend­ing on their cos­met­ics and clothes affected their income. The answer was that it did, but not enough to pay for itself in a strictly finan­cial sense.