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Why looking 'too pretty' in the workplace is a disadvantage, according to a behavioral analyst
Many people believe that life is easier for pretty people.
But studies suggest that beautiful women have it harder in the workplace than average-looking women or men, Wendy Patrick, a criminal attorney and lecturer in the Fowler School of Business at San Diego Statue University, said.
Good-looking women are seen as less trustworthy, more manipulative and 'dangerous'.
On top of that, pretty women are more likely to be objectified, putting them in positions where their career is compromised, Dr Patrick explained.
Studies suggest that pretty women are seen as less competent in masculine roles and are seen as less trustworthy leaders, Dr Patrick said
This stems from primal feelings of jealousy and competition Dr Patrick, wrote in a column for Psychology Today.
'Highly attractive women can be considered as dangerous,' Stefanie Johnson , an associate professor of Organizational Leadership and Information Analytics at University of Colorado who has studied the topic, told the San Diego Union Tribune.
It's not all bad news for pretty people. A 2022 Harvard study suggested that attractive people are more likely to perform better in job interviews and earn more money than average looking people.
Also, people who were rated as attractive even as a teenager were found to be more likely to earn more than their parents 20 years later than those not rated attractive, in a 2023 study from the Polish Academy of Sciences.
However, these benefits were much more pronounced for men than for women.
Even if attractive women have an advantage in landing a new position, it can be harder for them to prove that they earned their position and deserve to keep it. Two influential studies have cemented this idea, Dr Patrick said.
The first, published in 2012 by Professor Susanne Braun, who specializes in psychology and leadership at Durham University Business School in the UK found that attractive women were seen as less competent when applying to 'masculine jobs' like construction.
The second study of this kind was published in 2018 by Professor Johnson and Leah Sheppard, an assistant professor at Washington State University, and made waves across headlines.
It asked study participants to review the performance of both attractive and unattractive men and women announcing hypothetical layoffs. They also were asked whether that person should be fired.
The authors found that participants ranked attractive women as more deserving of being fired, less trustworthy and less truthful than their male counterparts and unattractive female counterparts.
This, the study authors suggested, is due to ancient evolutionary instincts - wherein women are taught to see attractive counterparts as competition and men are taught to see attractive women as desirable, but potentially untrustworthy.
'We suspect it’s the trope of the evil seductress: a subconscious anxiety among people of both sexes that beautiful women will use their looks to manipulate people, mostly men,' Professor Sheppard told the Harvard Business Review.
In addition, there's the obvious factor that attractive women are more likely to be objectified sexually than non attractive women - which can lead to dangerous and unprofessional situations in the work environment, Dr Patrick said.
It's not impossible to overcome these biases, Dr Patrick said. It might just take pretty people longer to win their colleagues over than average looking people.
'Physical attractiveness is only one aspect of the workplace experience. Kind, compassionate, gracious behavior can outweigh appearance biases,' Dr Patrick said.