Better-looking people earn more. But beauty is not the reason
An English translation of the Czech original, made with AI. The Czech text remains the record of what was written: Hezčí lidé vydělávají víc. Kvůli kráse to ale není.
Studies consistently find that more attractive people are more successful. But the latest studies show that beauty by itself does not bring a higher paycheck. What matters more is self-confidence, which often goes together with looks, writes economist Zuzana Irsova.
According to scientific studies, attractive people earn on average 5% more than those of average looks. For sex workers and politicians the gap is even larger. Perhaps surprisingly, many economists study the effect of beauty, and for two reasons: first, it is more fun than national accounts. Second, the result is useful for calculating compensation after car accidents. On the basis of this research, some US states are also considering protecting "ugly" people from discrimination.
How is this actually calculated? A controlled experiment would be best. But even an economist will eventually admit that it is not OK to disfigure thirty random people for the sake of a paper in Nature. One way around it is to compare people before and after plastic surgery. The coronavirus pandemic was also a natural experiment, because employers had no face-to-face contact with their employees. The same was true at universities between professors and students.
Perhaps surprisingly, most people agree on what beauty means. Beauty is above all facial symmetry. When different people rate the attractiveness of a face, their ratings rarely depart significantly from the symmetry measured by artificial intelligence or a simple algorithm. This, incidentally, holds across cultures and races. So once the photographs have been assigned a score (usually from 1 to 5), we can look at the relationship between beauty and pay, and by extension performance.
There are 67 scientific studies on this topic. When we put them together, we find that moving from a score of 3 (average) to 4 (good-looking) or 5 (beautiful) raises pay by 5%. So is this discrimination based on looks, and should we therefore protect "ugly" employees? The logic would be the same as in the case of pay discrimination against women. But then we would probably never stop, because further research shows that pay is also affected by height (for men) and curves (for women).
A new analysis shows that this is probably not arbitrary discrimination, as three findings suggest. First, the effect of beauty on performance is on average roughly the same as its effect on pay. If employers discriminated on the basis of their own tastes, the effect on pay would be larger than the effect on performance. As it is, it looks as though they are simply happy to pay extra for more productive employees.
Second, in fields where looks do not matter for the job (analysts, researchers, teachers, for example), new studies show a minimal effect of beauty on pay. Unsurprisingly, looks matter most for sex workers and politicians. Third, for the general population it usually holds that the beauty effect disappears once the researcher also takes into account employees' abilities, both intellectual and social.
Better-looking people do tend to be more capable, though. Only by a few percent, but still: how come? It is quite possible that better looks help build self-confidence, which can then translate into better performance in a team, greater assertiveness and higher pay.
Research also suggests that looks matter as early as childhood. Better-looking children get a little more attention from parents and teachers, which also helps them in life.
A less palatable possibility is that more beautiful people are, on average, a tiny bit more intelligent. Biologists disagree on this, but it would help explain the differences between the economic studies. Intelligence may be related to the overall "fine-tuning" of the organism, which also shows up as greater facial symmetry. This mechanism could have produced a genetic link between intelligence and the facial symmetry that people perceive as beauty.
Either way, the less beautiful among us need not despair: five percent is not much, and plastic surgery does not pay off. The effect of beauty can easily be outweighed by a little extra education or by working on our self-confidence. And if you are still not at ease, know that, according to the research, you can dramatically raise your own attractiveness by smiling often and acting energetically.
First published in Seznam Zprávy, 7 June 2024. Original publication.