Beauty and Academic Career

Abstract

We examine the impact of beauty on the academic career success of tenure-track accounting professors at top business schools in America, and show that beauty plays a significant role.Specifically, after controlling for gender, ethnicity, publication history, work experience, and quality of alma mater, more attractive professors obtain better first school placements postPhD and are granted tenure in a shorter period of time. Interestingly, there is no incremental benefit of attractiveness for the career progression from associate to full professor. These findings are consistent with our conjecture that when the signal of an individual's potential is noisy, beauty becomes a proxy for an individual's intellectual ability and social competency.The role played by beauty in hiring and promotion diminishes when the individual's ability and competency become apparent over time.

A Matter of Appearances: How Does Auditing Expertise Benefit Audit Committees When Selecting Auditors?†‡

“…Prior studies document the advantages of facial attractiveness across a wide variety of domains, including political elections (Todorov et al 2005), executive placements (Graham et al 2017), academic placements (Liu et al 2019), attorneys' career paths (Biddle and Hamermesh 1998), and negotiation success (Rosenblat 2008), among other examples reviewed by Hamermesh (2011).…”

“…Most recently, in an auditing study that examines client appearance rather than auditor appearance, Hsieh et al (2020) find that audit firms charge lower fees when client CFOs generate higher perceived trustworthiness scores from an algorithm based on their facial features. Although some of these studies condition the importance of physical appearances on factors that make substantive credentials more difficult to ascertain (e.g., Graham et al 2017;Liu et al 2019;Hsieh et al 2020), the factors they consider are inherent to the settings they examine. In contrast, we consider the conditioning influence of the decision maker, which in our case is the audit committee.…”

“…Numerous studies document associations between attractiveness and success in several domains, including executive placements (Graham et al 2017), academic placements (Liu et al 2019), negotiation outcomes (Rosenblat 2008), and political elections (Todorov et al 2005), among others (see Hamermesh (2011) for a review of this literature). Some of these studies also show that appearances become more influential when other criteria are less accessible (e.g., Graham et al 2017;Liu et al 2019;Hsieh et al 2020). However, prior studies generally overlook the role of decision makers who might or might not rely on attractiveness.…”

“Beauty” premium for social scientists but “unattractiveness” premium for natural scientists in the public speaking market

“…Indeed, the research does in fact document a "beautiful-is-good halo effect" (Liu et al, 2018) that may lead to attractive individuals being judged and treated more positively (Adams and Crane, 1980;Berscheid et al, 1971;Dion, 1973;Langlois et al, 1991;Snyder et al, 1985). These individuals may even be rated as more sociable, dominant, sexually warm, mentally healthy, and socially skilled than less attractive persons (Feingold, 1992).…”

“…Yet, although experimental evidence indicates that more attractive individuals are more confident in problem-solving, it does not indicate they are more productive (Mobius and Rosenblat, 2006). Nonetheless, in academia, better-looking teachers tend to receive higher teacher ratings than their colleagues (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005;Myers, 1995), while more attractive doctoral graduates enjoy better first job placements and are awarded tenure faster (Liu et al, 2018). The public also appears more interested in learning about the work of more attractive scientists, although their attractiveness is negatively correlated with public judgments about whether the work is of high quality (Gheorghiu et al, 2017).…”