Correlation between beauty and wages

Miscellaneous General
1

I just finished reading two articles about beauty and wages. This gave me a headache. I really, really need help.

The Link between Wages and Appearance

A study by economists Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle uses survey data to examine the impact that appearance has on a person’s earnings. In each survey, the interviewer who asked the questions also rated the respondents’physical appearance.

Hamermesh and Biddle found that the “plainness penalty” is 9 percent and that the “beauty premium” is 5 percent after controlling for other variables, such as education and experience.

Indeed, occupations that require more interpersonal contact have higher percentages of aboveaverage-looking employees. However, Hamermesh and Biddle showed that the plainness penalty and the beauty premium exist across all occupations.

Economists Susan Averett and Sanders Korenman studied the effects of obesity on wages, using a sample consisting of individuals aged 16-24 in 1981 who were 23-31 in 1988. They showed that women who were obese according to their Body Mass Index (BMI) in both 1981 and 1988 earned 17 percent lower wages on average than women within their recommended BMI range. However, women who became obese between those two survey years earned only slightly less than women of recommended BMI.

Economists Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlewaite and Dan Silverman tried to explain the origin of the “height premium.” They focused on white men to avoid possible discrimination based on gender or race. After controlling for a number of family characteristics that are generally correlated with both height and wages (parents’ education, parents’ occupation and number of siblings), they found that for white men in the United States, a 1.8-percent increase in wages accompanies every additional inch of height.

Appearance, for example, can affect confidence and communication, thereby influencing productivity. A study by economists Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat estimates that confidence accounts for approximately 20 percent of the beauty premium.

Moreover, the wage differential for obesity seems to be limited to white women, belying an unmeasured productivity explanation.

Hey, Gorgeous, Here’s a Raise!

Better-looking men get more job offers, higher starting salaries, and better raises.

But while men suffer more for being ugly, women—and specifically white women—suffer more for being fat.

Surely to some extent money buys beauty. The more you earn, the more you can spend on cosmetics, health care, and plastic surgery. … 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.

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.

So… good-looking raises confidence, and confidence raises productivity, but confidence accounts for 20% of beauty premium. Good-looking men and good-looking women get higher wages. These economists conclude : employers don’t like ugly men and fat women. This makes nonsense…
The problem remains. What can explain these differences ?

2

Self-reporting on a survey concerning one’s own physical appearance sounds about as scientific as sacrificing a burnt offering to read the sign…

It might simply be that people who earn less money come to feel worse about themselves generally, or that people who have a generally negative view of themselves earn less as a result of that. Or who knows, it could be any damned thing, it’s a survey about how ugly one thinks themself. How ugly do you think you are?

Of course there are jobs where physical beauty of the human body as an object is the entire point, and who are we to judge. But I dare say a lot of corporate/government peons might be chosen more for their looks than their abilities too, since their jobs aren’t exactly a consequence of what the company’s supposed consumers want from the company, nor are the shareholders in a position to do anything or even know. Maybe professional management likes to perve and be a control freak over more attractive people, who knows.

3

I think I read somewhere that good looking people get more dates than average looking people – by, like, 25% or thereabouts – and with better looking people, to boot. Go figure.

4

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200903/beautiful-people-are-more-intelligent-i

I would guess that it is due to the correlation between looks and intelligence. Attractive women seek men with high income potential, so they are more likely to marry intelligent men and make intelligent, beautiful babies. Whereas unattractive women Also, more positive feedback. If someone asked you whether attractive waitresses got tipped more than unattractive ones for the same work, what would you guess?

5

These economists conclude : employers don’t like ugly men and fat women. This makes nonsense…

It makes a lot of sense and is well known. All other things equal, people will hire the better looking and/or more confident person.

The explanation is to be found in psychology, not economics, it seems to me.

6

James,

You’re a child. Your schoolmates tell you : “James, you are good-looking”. And you’re convinced you’re indeed beautiful. Your schoolmates tell you : “James, I hate your ugly face”. And you’re convinced you’re ugly. Even if standards of beauty change over time within the same culture, it changes slowly.
By the way, the beauty premium exist across all occupations (eg, auto-mechanics).

Kaiser,

I read the article you pointed out. I found this very, very interesting (I highly recommend this article), but the problem remains. Even if employers believe that beautiful people are more intelligent (indeed, higher IQ), more productive, this can’t explain why taller employees earn more than smaller employees. There’s a lot we don’t understand.
Yet, I don’t know whether the study you indicate have controlled variables like education level and income level or not, since IQ depends not only on genetics, but also standard of living.

Smiling Dave,

Mobius and Rosenblat estimates that confidence accounts for approximately 20 percent of the beauty premium. So self-esteem cannot explain a large part of beauty premium.

7

My goodness ! I forgot. Height is highly, highly heritable. I suppose beautiful women still want to marry taller (and rich) men. And as Satoshi Kanazawa said, physical attractiveness is highly heritable, and intelligence is highly heritable. It’s all about genetics. Interesting.

8

Physically attractive people are treated better in general. Much more so by the same sex and by other people that are attractive. In the case of the same sex judgement is based more on stereotypes.

People with more money are also treated better by most people. This crosses the political spectrum. Basically, anything that makes you seem “better” than others causes people to invest more in you and care more about you.

Speaking of other stereotypes, when I had long hair found extreme prejudice against me from males, which continues to be the case even in this forum where I use an outdated photo, and generally was treated like trash by males. The contrast in behaviour has always amazed me. Women adore me while men ridicule me.

9

To add to that, It would depend on the function of the job that is in question. If it is a customer or client facing job then a more attractive person would be more desirable from an employers perspective, because attractive people would have an extra advantage when it comes to influencing people. But that would not always be the case and without the skill, the attractiveness of the person would not add enough value to warrant investment at all. So when it comes down to choosing an employee, the skill or ability is the main factor and then appearance is second. If they had to chose between two people, one being more attractive, but they both have the same ability, the attractive person would get the job because that would be seen as an additional attribute.

But if the job is not customer facing then appearance would be irrelevant unless the employer has motives other than employing the person to do the actual job he is employed to do.

But then people say that this means that attractive people have an advantage but at the same time there are disadvantages, they have to live up to higher expectations and are expected to be confident.

10

Not all is lost! If you want to be a ruthless pirate it is better to be ugly.

11

Expectations are set by what is normal. Being attractive means that you’ve already exceeded expectations.

That’s what I meant in what you quoted: there are other motives. I don’t know why you quoted that sentence, though. It was a sweeping statement.

12

I would guess that it is due to the correlation between looks and intelligence. Attractive women seek men with high income potential, so they are more likely to marry intelligent men and make intelligent, beautiful babies. Whereas unattractive women Also, more positive feedback. If someone asked you whether attractive waitresses got tipped more than unattractive ones for the same work, what would you guess?

Beat me to it!

As to the original question, it’d be interesting to see how this trend has evolved across time. I’d hazard a guess that as time as gone the beauty premium has gone up suggesting that a) as productivity has become harder and harder to measure the traditional signals for productivity have become noisier and we’ve shifted to other signals (such as looks which happened to be correlated with a whole bunch of other things) and b) “attractiveness” is a normal good. It wouldn’t suprise me if some of the explanation is just that people like to be around good looking people.

By the way, I think it’s important to try and understand what being good looking signals. Generally it signals high status which in turn implies qualities such as reliability, trustworthiness etc.

We all do this to some extent. I know I do it a lot when I see a male with long hair or all dressed in black or whatever I’ll make disparaging remarks or treat them with a lot less respect. I suppose there are a few possible explanations for this, part of which is just the natural human tendency to not want to be seen with those who’d we’d consider to be of lesser status. Of course, it’s rarely socially acceptable for one to point this out, so we just find proxies for lower status like long hair and criticize those.

13

Caley McKibbin & EconomistInTraining ,

I highly recommend you to read the great article Kaiser posted above. I don’t think beautiful workers earn more “just” because they’re more fun to look at. As kanazawa said … “there is a widespread perception shared by many people that physically attractive people are more intelligent and competent” :

Why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people?

  1. Assortative mating of tall men and beautiful women. Because height is desirable in men and physical attractiveness is desirable in women, there should be assortative mating between tall men and beautiful women (and short men and less beautiful women). Because both height and physical attractiveness are heritable, this will create an extrinsic (non-causal) correlation among their children between height and physical attractiveness, where tall people (both men and women) are more beautiful than short people.

  2. Assortative mating of intelligent men and beautiful women. Because intelligent men tend to attain higher status, at least in the evolutionarily novel environment in recent history, and high status is desirable in men, and because physical attractiveness is desirable in women, there should be assortative mating between intelligent (and thus high-status) men and beautiful women. Because both intelligence and physical attractiveness are heritable, this will create an extrinsic (non-causal) correlation among their children between intelligence and physical attractiveness, where more attractive people are more intelligent than less attractive people.

  3. Extrinsic correlation between height and physical attractiveness (produced by Mechanism 1 above) and extrinsic correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness (produced by Mechanism 2 above) will create a second-order extrinsic correlation between height and intelligence.

Employers must believe that beautiful people are more productive, so they earn more than the ugly ones.

14

I did read those. I already long ago discovered that people assume “beautiful is good”. It’s standard fare that villains are ugly and heroes are gorgeous. But, as I was getting at with my example, any type of “beauty” will do. Also, any hypothesis based on the assumption that people are strict optimizers is very shaky.

Btw, “height” is not really more desirable. Otherwise women would not like Brad Pitt because he’s only 10-20" tall (depending on the TV screen size). How is “height” judged?

15

"Btw, “height” is not really more desirable. Otherwise women would not like Brad Pitt because he’s only 10-20" tall (depending on the TV screen size)."

That has got to be the most flimsy argument ever. It astonishes me that you would even consider that as a plausible reasoning. It’s like saying, “Shit doesn’t smell cause it’s on TV,” or “people don’t die 'cause i don’t see it.” There are too many falsities in that thinking that are obvious. You could have just said Tom Cruise is short and that Kathy Griffin is successful. One doesn’t have to be tall or attractive or smart to be successful. You need not be absoutist to prove your point. And people need not be tall or good looking to be successful You

Height (to scale or in proportion or symetrical) to its real life counterpart.

And these economic findings are a little bit absurd anyway. Physical attraction has been proven to be a function of primal instincts. Taller men are more ‘attractive’ because all throughtout evolution they have been able to protect their weaker female counterparts. Smart men are ‘desired’ in modern times because the threat of being physically accosted has dropped while intelligence has been its succesor.

Those studies are trying to correlate things that don’t necessarily need it.

16

It’s like saying, “The image of Brad Pitt is 10” and he is still desirable." Which is true and also disproves the absolute height myth.

That is another myth. 2/3 of homicides against women are committed by their “protectors”. Put another way, a woman is twice as likely to be murdered by her lover than all other sources combined. In case anyone has difficulty putting these pieces together, men are not protectors.

In case anyone doesn’t notice, that is a link in that post.

17

you’re saying 2/3 of homicides are caused by their so called protectors. how many of the total population of man/wife relationships can we say are homicides? Is it 2/3’s of 1/16th or 1/32nd? Cause that is much smaller.

18

I read your document. Very interesting study.

WCR (waist-to-chest ratio) was found to be the principal determinant of attractiveness and accounted for 56% of the variance, whereas BMI accounted for only 12.7% of additional variance.
…
Their finding means that women prefer men whose torso has an ‘inverted triangle’ shape (ie a narrow waist and a broad chest and shoulders). This is a shape consistent with physical strength and muscle development in the upper body. The relatively less importance of BMI in male attractiveness is in sharp contrast to the significance of BMI in determining female attractiveness ( Tovée et al. 1998 ; Tovée & Cornelissen 1999 ; Fan et al. 2004 ).
…
Male bodies having lower WCR (waist-to-chest ratio) values tend to have higher AR (attractiveness ratings) within the range of male bodies investigated, which is in agreement with the findings of Maisey et al. (1999).
…
The analysis showed that, for both ARFs (attractiveness ratings by Female) and ARMs (attractiveness ratings by Male), WCR was chosen as the most important factor and accounted for 53.6% and 49.6% of the variance, respectively. BMI was chosen as the second significant factor for ARs by female raters and accounted for only 4.3% of additional variance; WHR (waist-to-hip ratio) was chosen as the second significant factor for ARs by male raters and accounted for only 3.5% of additional variance.
…
In other words, an obese male with larger waist girth, hip girth or chest girth over chin height has poor body attractiveness.

I don’t know whether Kanazawa’s study have controlled for these variables, or not. Although I don’t think this refutes his conclusion.

19

They key thing there is VHI. Slimmer is better and slim looks tall. If Shorty McFats drank a potion of double size he would be 10 feet of ugly.