Men benefit more from their looks at work than women do, new research shows

Men benefit more from their looks at work than women do, new research shows

submitted by Rimu edited

www.cnbc.com/2024/02/02/men-benefit-more-from-t…

Study (N=11K;20 years) finds attractive men more likely to attain better jobs & earn more than similarly attractive women. Attractive women had a slight advantage over unattractive women but men saw greatest benefits. For women being attractive is incompatible with stereotypes of leaders. “Women are held to a specific standard of attractiveness & are often punished when they fail to uphold that standard, but then they’re punished when they do—it’s a lose-lose situation.”

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10 Comments

Gaywallet (they/it)

In ways, this doesn't really surprise me. But, it's neat to see some actual data on this. Ultimately, sexism reigns supreme, as per usual, in the workplace.

I do think there are some minor methodological issues with this study, but they really aren't worth going into.

ezchili , edited

An okcupid research had shown that most (80%) men were considered below average by women

Since it's so rare to be an attractive man I could imagine if you did a study like that, depending on how you chose and rate participants, you could be comparing men's 2 first deciles with women's 5+ first deciles

crossmr , edited

This is a pretty questionable study. The supplementary materials don't have any breakdown of the 11000 volunteers at all, like how many were were in each category, how many people they had rating them, did they have exactly the same group rating all 11,000, etc.

Also was there any follow-up on this to account for changes over 20 years? I know plenty of people at 15 who would have been attractive, but not been by the time they were 35. Weight gain, bad plastic surgery, accidents, generally ageing poorly, etc.

ezchili , edited

I think there's more rigorous studies but done on smaller numbers of participants, but sci-hub's captchas are broken today so that's where that ends.

I know of other data blog posts going in the same general vibe from tinder hinge etc but no serious study has asked >1000 people to "rate" other people

jarfil

What was the opposite, of women considered unattractive by men?

I know it's a meme at this point that men swipe right all the time, but I've heard some really shitty comments "when nobody was listening", and know of women who seem to get one night stand after another, but can't find anyone to stay any longer.

Particularly, it would be interesting to see the results *without any makeup*.

ezchili , edited

https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/

Men do a regular kind of bell looking curve around the middle value for women

Careful with that study because it is often misused or wrongly associated to a paretto distribution

jarfil

What I find interesting, is that the graph for "men messaging hot women", is almost the reverse of "women rating men's hotness".

It's a pity to not see the actual number of messages per individual, it would be interesting to see whether men actually ignore most of women, or if all women get overwhelmed by messages making them more picky.

In the original article, there seems to be a clue pointing towards that, where response rates take a dip in the least attractive responding to the most attractive. Men seem to be much more gullible, while women more wary.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/

ezchili , edited

What I enjoy as well is that while women rate men lower, they still message them

Also least attractive users all message the 10s way less, but with women the curve dips hard and they do it as well for 9s and 8s

jarfil

I think it makes sense that they'd prefer to message "above average" men... just that their assessment of what an "average man" means, is way lover.

Men are either picky AF, or horny AF... and I'm inclined to think the later.

millie , edited

80% of men trolling a dating site are unattractive? Seems like a pretty reasonable estimation to me. Like, you're literally looking at the environment that we'd expect to *most* select for unattractive people. It's literally a pile of respondents who can't find a date, *but want one*. You could hardly find a *more* biasing source for the generation of this particular Snapple fact.