ARE GOOD-LOOKING PEOPLE MORE EMPLOYABLE?

Bradley Ruffle and Zeev Shtudiner

No 1006, Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics

Abstract: Job applicants in Europe and in Israel increasingly imbed a headshot of them- selves in the top corner of their CVs. We sent 5312 CVs in pairs to 2656 advertised job open- ings. In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the second, otherwise almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive male/female or a plain-looking male/female. Employer callbacks to attractive men are significantly higher than to men with no picture and to plain-looking men, nearly doubling the latter group. Strikingly, attractive women do not enjoy the same beauty premium. In fact, women with no picture have a significantly higher rate of callbacks than attractive or plain-looking women. We explore a number of explanations and provide evidence that female jealousy of attractive women in the workplace is a primary reason for the punishment of attractive women.

Keywords: beauty; discrimination; experimental economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2010
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/humsos/Econ/Workingpapers/1006.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are Good-Looking People More Employable? (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bgu:wpaper:1006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aamer Abu-Qarn ().