New research upends the trope that women use their looks to get ahead in their careers, showing that men actually reap greater benefits from being attractive in the workplace.
A recent study of more than 11,000 Americans conducted over 20 years has found that good-looking men are more likely to attain better jobs and make more money than similarly attractive women.
In 1993, two sociologists from the University of Oslo and the Polish Academy of Sciences identified young Americans between the ages of 12 and 18 using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (NLSAH).
Alexi Gugushvili and Grzegorz Bulczak recorded participants' demographic information and socioeconomic status, then asked volunteers to rate the participants' physical attractiveness on a 4-point scale: Very attractive, attractive, unattractive, and very unattractive.
In the report, Gugushvili and Bulczak explained that they chose to base the research on teenagers' perceived attractiveness as adults have greater financial means to manipulate or enhance their physical appearance (like getting plastic surgery) so those scores would feel less genuine.
Two decades later, when the participants had reached their late 30s, the researchers compared the attractiveness scores of the 15-year-old volunteers to their current career status.
They discovered that those who had moved up the corporate ladder the fastest — and were earning the most — were the men who had been deemed "very attractive" as teenagers.
Even with potential obstacles like coming from a low-income household or growing up in a dangerous neighborhood, attractive men still managed to achieve upward mobility.
Good-looking women had a slight advantage in their careers over other women deemed less attractive, but men saw the greatest benefits from their physical appearance, according to the report.
"This suggests that for men, being attractive plays a significant role in your professional success, whether it's getting a raise, a promotion or access to more competitive jobs," says Gugushvili.
Double standards could be holding women back
Other research has shown that many of the characteristics people use to describe strong, capable leaders are masculine.
"It's not a coincidence that many U.S. presidents, for example, have been men that are over six feet tall," says Jennie Blumenthal, the founder and CEO of Corporate Rehab, a leadership consulting firm. "We tend to assume that someone stronger, taller and better-looking than their peers is more capable of leading, which automatically puts women at a disadvantage."
Gugushvili and Bulczak found that women's attractiveness is typically characterized by "weak" feminine traits, like being passive, agreeable, tender and loving.
Gugushvili also points out that some corporate cultures favor masculine traits — so while men are expected to lead with decisiveness, women are discouraged from taking up jobs with a high level of authority and given harmful labels such as "difficult" or "bossy," because it's seen as unattractive.
In other words, being an attractive woman is incompatible with the ingrained stereotypes and expectations people might hold for business leaders.
Blumenthal, a former Fortune 500 executive, says that female leaders suffer from a "likeability trap."
"You have to be liked enough to be invited to the table but not so likable that you're considered a pushover or not qualified to be a leader," says Blumenthal. "There are still these limiting gender biases that we haven't overcome."
For women, beauty can be a liability
Attractive women can face greater penalties in the workplace for their looks than their male counterparts.
Other research has shown that attractive women are often seen as less capable or less qualified for their positions than their peers — and in extreme cases, less trustworthy. Attractive men did not face similar repercussions for their physical appearance.
"Women feel so much pressure to modify and police their bodies, there's almost no margin for error," says Randi Braun, an executive coach and bestselling author of "Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work." "Women are held to a specific standard of attractiveness and are often punished when they fail to uphold that standard, but then they're punished when they do — it's a lose-lose situation."
Gugushvili points out that gender equality in the United States, overall, could have skewed the results of their research.
The United States ranked 43rd among 143 countries included in the World Economic Forum's 2023 global gender parity index. The rankings were determined based on gaps in four main areas: work, education, health and political leadership.
"That could be one of the reasons why inequality between attractive men and women manifests in the workplace in the United States, in such a blatant way," he says. "It would be interesting to see if that same issue exists in a more egalitarian country, like Finland or Denmark."
Finland ranked third on the WEF's global gender parity index, while Denmark claimed the 23rd spot on the list.
Gugushvili recognizes limitations in the data, including the potential influence of late bloomers or other unmeasured factors on professional success, stressing that further research is needed to validate their findings.
Still, Braun says the research highlights the subtle barriers and microaggressions that continue to obstruct women's career advancement — and those can often do the greatest damage.
Adds Braun: "If we don't have systems in place to check this kind of unconscious bias that exists everywhere, from the hiring to the promotion process, it just creates more broken rungs women face on the career ladder."
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