For women in business, beauty is a liability

New research reveals the extra obstacles attractive female executives face. Photo / 123RF

Leah D. Sheppard, an assistant professor at Washington State University, and Stefanie K. Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, mocked up articles about company layoffs that included photos of the executives announcing the cuts. They then had study participants read the articles, rate the honesty of the leaders pictured and decide whether they should be fired. When the executive shown was a woman, people found her to be less truthful and more worthy of termination if she was also highly attractive. The conclusion: For women in business, beauty is a liability.

Professor Sheppard, defend your research.

Sheppard: The articles we created for our experiments quoted a company leader explaining that the layoffs were due to economic conditions rather than some failure within the organisation itself. We recruited both male and female participants in the United States via Mechanical Turk — an online platform on which people are usually more educated than the general population — divided them into four groups and showed each group a different photo of the spokesperson announcing the cuts. Some saw a highly attractive woman, others a less-attractive woman, some a highly attractive man, others a less-attractive man. We'd previously asked other people to rate the attractiveness of the executives pictured, and for consistency, all were white and professionally attired. We also used photos of two different men and women in each category of attractiveness — to make sure it wasn't something else about the person shown or the photo itself that was causing the effect — though each study participant saw only one person.

Then we asked our study participants a few questions: How much did they trust the explanation the executive gave? Did he or she seem honest? And in a later study, which recruited subjects from a pool of US university students and focused just on female executives, we also asked whether the leaders should be fired for their role in the layoffs. We found that the beautiful women were perceived to be less truthful, less trustworthy as leaders, and more deserving of termination than their ordinary-looking female counterparts.

HBR: What about the men?

We saw almost no difference in people's responses to the attractive and less-attractive male spokespersons making the same statement about layoffs. In some cases the handsome men were even seen as slightly more truthful than average-looking ones.

Q: As a woman, that makes me so mad!

A: The news isn't all bad for women: The less-attractive women were rated higher for honesty and trustworthiness than both types of men in our study.

Q: Are there any benefits to being a beautiful woman in the workplace?

A: In a separate study we had the people in the photos rated on perceived competence and found that regardless of their gender, the highly attractive leaders were deemed more competent. So even if beautiful women are seen as less truthful, they're associated with other positive qualities. There might also be certain roles in which being seen as less forthcoming could be an advantage, at least in the eyes of the organisation — sales, for example. More generally, we do know from existing research that attractive people tend to fare better throughout their lives: They get more attention from teachers in school; they have more romantic choices; they earn higher salaries.

Q: What might be driving this mistrust of attractive women?

A: 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. This might have evolutionary roots; attractiveness has historically been a tool that women have used to compete for access to men and, through them, economic mobility. Even today research shows that men still place a higher value on their partners' physical attributes than women do, even though they view prettier women as less trustworthy.

Q: Could this be a reaction related only to how executives announce bad news?

A: In another experiment we asked people to rate spokespeople presenting positive organisational news — an announcement of new jobs — and found that the female beauty penalty persisted. We also presented women in different kinds of roles. Previous research had suggested that people react more negatively to attractive women in jobs seen as more masculine, such as high-ranking executive positions, as opposed to more typically female-dominated roles, such as PR officers. But our study participants had doubts about pretty women's trustworthiness even in the latter case.

Q: Could race be a factor?

A: We didn't look at how the race of study participants might have affected their choices. But that could be an interesting direction for future research, because we do know that gender stereotypes play out differently for white and black women, as they do for white and black men. For example, black women and white men experience less backlash for assertive behavior than white women and black men do.

Q: Is there anything we can do to counteract these biases?

A: Yes. When we primed study participants to feel romantically secure before showing them the mocked-up articles, the female beauty penalty went away. The attractive spokeswomen were seen as just as honest, trustworthy and deserving of keeping their jobs as the less-attractive ones.

Of course, this is tricky to address in a business context. We tend to assume that when we go to work we turn our sexual selves off. But there's a lot of spillover that you can't necessarily control and might not even be aware of. The bias-awareness training we get usually addresses discrimination based on gender, race, sexual orientation and sometimes religion. But it tends not to include bias against either very attractive people or those who might be seen as unattractive or overweight. We might recognize that those biases exist, but there's a reticence about discussing or correcting them.

Q: What about hiring?

A: The recruitment process should be as anonymous as possible for as long as possible. For instance, you can have a third party assign ID numbers to résumés or applications so that people's names don't give any clues to gender or race. That also will make it less likely that someone involved in hiring will Google the candidates and find photos that show their gender, race, and level of attractiveness, and other personal information. At the interview stage, organisations should make sure that lots of people interact with each candidate to balance out individual biases and idiosyncrasies.

Q: I don't think of myself as highly attractive, but I do make an effort to dress well and put on makeup when I go to work. Should I stop?

A: Not necessarily, unless these activities make you feel uncomfortable. Though offices are becoming more casual, most still have norms that encourage putting effort into your appearance. I also hate to give advice to women about how to "fix" this, because telling them to downplay their beauty — by putting their hair in a bun or wearing glasses — can make them feel ashamed or embarrassed. Instead I might advise them to engage in more behaviours that we know build trust — being warm, caring and transparent. But even that is problematic because it's putting the onus on women to change when this is really part of a larger issue.

Q: What more in this realm do you want to study?

A: I'd like to know whether this effect goes away once people get to know a beautiful woman or if it tends to last because it changes how we interact with her, which then changes how she responds to us in a way that confirms our initial suspicions. I'm also curious about how this plays out in the political sphere. We vote for leaders that we don't really get to know personally; we just know what we see on TV and decide if we trust them or not based on that. Are we biased against more-attractive female candidates?

Q: How did you get interested in this topic?

A: My interest isn't related to any specific personal experiences I've had, but I've observed that attractiveness is generally a tricky thing for women to navigate: There are clearly benefits to being beautiful, but you also get a lot of criticism from both men and women if you're viewed as flaunting your beauty or sexuality. Female leaders face a lot of double binds. This is another. It's unfortunate, but it's a reality.

Written by: Ania G. Wieckowski

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