Forget the stereotype that women use their looks to get ahead at the office — it’s actually attractive men who benefit most from their appearance in the workplace.
A groundbreaking study of 11,583 Americans conducted over a 20-year period has found that good-looking men are more likely to attain better jobs and make more money than similarly desirable women.
Researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences conducted the long-term study. The results were published in this month’s issue of Social Science Quarterly.
“Physical attractiveness matters both for males’ and females’ intergenerational social mobility outcomes, but it is more important for males,” the academics asserted, bucking the age-old trope that good looks are only useful for ladies.
Handsome men also out-earned males who were deemed average or unattractive, additionally helping to prove that physical appearance is a factor in helping males get ahead at work.
“Across three measures of social mobility — education, occupation, and income— physically attractive males are more likely to be socially mobile than males of average attractiveness,” the researchers further declared.
For the study, the researchers pulled information about the 11,583 participants from the United States National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
At the age of 15, the participants had their demographic information and socioeconomic data recorded. Interviewers also rated the participants’ physical attractiveness on a 4-point scale: Very attractive, attractive, unattractive, and very unattractive.
While it initially may seem strange to base the study on beauty scores given to teenagers, the researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences asserted that it provided the fairest base from which to start.
They claim that wealthy adults often use their finances to manipulate or enhance their physical appearance, meaning an assessment of adult beauty scores would be skewered in favor of those with money.
For this reason, they focused on physical attractiveness as assessed at age 15.
Two decades later, when the participants had reached the age of 35, the researchers took a look at the their updated socioeconomic data. They found those who had moved up the wealth ladder most drastically were men who had been deemed very attractive to begin with.
“The results show that there may be more to gain from attractiveness for males than for females and that, with each step on the attractiveness ladder (very attractive, attractive, unattractive, very attractive), males increase their advantage in income mobility,” the researchers declared.
They found that the very attractive men were able to be upwardly mobile in spite of other factors that may have plagued them, such as “parental socioeconomic position” and “neighborhood conditions.”
However, the researchers did highlight some limitations of their research.
They noted that the participants were still relatively young at the age of 35, and physical attractiveness may become less of a factor in earning capacity as the years continue to advance. Therefore, its possible that unattractive or very attractive men may thrive in the workforce later in life.
The research also didn’t account for whether very attractive women had dropped out of the workforce to marry a wealthy man or raise children by the age of 35, which could have impacted their claim that males benefit more from good looks than females.