If you're attractive you stand a better chance of making more money than your less attractive colleagues, says Dr. Daniel Hamermesh, a labour economist at the University of Texas at Austin.
It's a provocative statement, but one which is "a little less incendiary than race or sex as a focus for thinking about discrimination," says Hamermesh, who recently visited the University of Victoria to present a Lansdowne lecture on the topic.
Hamermesh is known for applying economics to unusual aspects of human behaviour. One of his studies showed that higher incomes lead to reduced suicide rates. Another study demonstrated that time spent sleeping decreases as people's wage rates rise, especially among men.
At the UVic lecture, entitled "The Economics of Beauty and the Meaning of Discrimination," Hamermesh described how he has reached the conclusion that, in the labour market, it pays to be good-looking&emdash;literally.
One of his early studies piggybacked on three national, house-to-house market surveys&emdash;two in the U.S. and one in Canada&emdash;where the interviewer was asked to rate the physical attractiveness of survey respondents on a one to five scale (five was strikingly beautiful or handsome, one was homely). He then correlated the ratings to personal information such as income.
He found that, for men, those who were below average in looks made about nine per cent less a year than average-looking men. And good-looking men were making about 5.5 per cent more than average-looking men. The effects were smaller for women (5.5 and 3.9 per cent, respectively). "This was adjusting for other variables, such as age, location, education, health and marital status," says Hamermesh.
In another study, Hamermesh and his colleagues obtained incoming student mugshots from 12 law school classes&emdash;six in the 1970s and six in the 1980s&emdash;and had a panel rate each of the 4,500 students for beauty. They then tracked the career progress of each student after graduation, using surveys conducted one, five and 15 years afterwards.
The results show that, for men, being good-looking earned them one per cent more a year after graduation. By year five, they were making 2.5 per cent more. And by year 15, they were being paid about 6.5 per cent more than their not-so-good-looking colleagues. No results were obtained for women because there were too few in law classes at the time.
Hamermesh next looked at the possible sources and reasons for this wage discrimination. His results suggest that the driving force may in fact lie with customers and clients, not the employers. In professions where interaction with the public is high and image often matters&emdash;such as law, advertising sales, and real estate&emdash;incomes were markedly higher for good-looking people.
Hamermesh admits that his findings are not popular with many people, but they appear to be a sad fact of life. "Do we want to extend legal protection to the ugly?" he asks. "That's a question we all need to ask ourselves. It's really a question of values and political will, because we can't protect against every type of wage discrimination."