Do looks matter for an academic career in economics? | Hacker News Reader

Do looks matter for an academic career in economics?

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43 pointsxqcgrek250 comments

On this topic, there was recently a Swedish study on economics student that showed how the grades dropped for attractive female students during the pandemic (distance learning). The grades for men and less attractive women remained the same.

https://www.forskning.se/2022/10/25/studenters-utseende-kan-...

There should be a term for this : beautism. Eg usage: This lady is a victim of beautism.

You got it reversed

It could still hurt long-term. They could arguably be made a victim from such treatment. Some people, applying to either men and women, get shocked when their youthful appearance doesn't work as well anymore for social or team dynamics.

A similar argument: a billionaire could find themselves embarrassed when they run into something that cannot be bought because they don't care about money. But to conclude from that that being a billionaire hurts your chances in life seems ridiculous.

It's actually problematic if people react weirdly to you being pretty or otherwise attractive and effectively give you inaccurate feedback concerning the quality of your work.

I think this is part why Theranos was such a debacle. I have difficulty imagining a company led by a man being valued at $10 billion based on a lot of hot air and then going to zero overnight as happened with Theranos.

WeWork. Need I say more?

Yes please, I don't have a datapoint regarding WeWork so I don't know what you are referring to.

I've heard that before. I don't think it really compares.

You go to the Wikipedia page for Theranos and it opens with "Theranos Inc. was an American privately held corporation..."

WeWork still exists. It has a fraught history but did not go overnight from a multi-billion dollar valuation to zero. Neumann also had prior business experience, was older and had a business partner, so he had a lot more street cred for whatever hype he was selling than Holmes did.

Holmes was a 19 year old college drop out with no track record who claimed to be celibate in her twenties due to her extreme devotion to her company. In reality, she was secretly living with an older man who was an investor in her company.

I really don't think the two compare.

> I have difficulty imagining a company led by a man being valued at $10 billion based on a lot of hot air and then going to zero overnight as happened with Theranos.

FTX / SBF.

A much better example than WeWork.

Is it problematic? Certainly not for the employee.

Surely there's about a 10-20 year span where this person is getting ahead due to factors that are external to their work before age starts to take its toll on their looks. A bald, average-looking, overweight man and a slim, attractive man with a full head of hair with the exact same production will not be treated the same in most companies. Of the two, the more attractive guy will be seen as management material. A future face of the company. So they will get promoted first. And once they get ahead, they're not giving that lead up, because these comparisons will happen again and again at leach level.

And the Theranos woman? Her connections got her the fame she needed, and she then relied on cultish tropes to trick folks into giving her money. Even with hours in a makeup chair, she's barely even attractive at all.

Last November, Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison. Probably not the outcome she was shooting for when she dropped out of college at age 19 to start her own company.

> she's barely even attractive at all

To each their own, I suppose. I thought she was cute.

Well, I'm not giving bonus points for blonde hair and pale skin, and otherwise she's got a completely average bone structure and facial features on the verge of having chipmunk cheeks. I just can't see how someone who looks that plain would be able to coerce people to invest in her company based on her attractiveness.

There already is a term, "lookism."

Lookism should be opposite of beautism .

Attractiveness matters in every career, with rare exceptions of careers where you never ever interact with other humans (or, if you interact, they can't see you).

I was going to say the same thing. I would add though, if you aren't overly attractive, keeping yourself together is usually good enough. Dress well, good grooming, bathe regularly, keep the weight down, the usual stuff.

Even if they can't see you, attractive people tend to be more confident because they have fewer memories of negative feedback when they do something outside the norm. This leads to them being more daring in their creative and academic works, pushing norms because their experiences have rewarded pushing the envelope.

I’m not sure if this is true. I think that if you receive enough negative feedback you may adopt an IDGAF outlook on social feedback in general. If you are used to receiving positive feedback I think you may end up more constrained by the social feedback system. There is probably a dip in the middle where someone is more desperate for positive feedback but has not discarded the system, which probably works like you describe. Of course it is still best to be an attractive person who has also unhooked from the social feedback system, it just seems less likely to unhook in that case.

Resilience and healthy coping mechanisms are orthogonal factors. Someone who is resilient and optimistic is far more likely to do well regardless of their attractiveness because they’ll be able to adopt an IDGAF stance, as you say, to compensate in case of shortcomings in other areas.

That, however, is a separate skill that must also be nurtured and developed.

The problem with a IDGAF mentalities is you're optimizing for satisfying personal expression, not a balance between a low-stakes ostracization and those glimmers of brilliance that keep you in the loop. You're drawn to misanthropes and those who promote IDGAF aims for IDGAF sake.

I feel this is what happened to Louis C.K. After being ousted from the mainstream comedian community for his antics, he's become more beholden to the smaller subset of his audience that will worship him no matter what, so he gets high off his smaller cult following and less receptive to the larger scale waves of feedback and sentiment he got from his forays into the mainstream. As a result his recent specials have been more mediocre.

The frustrating thing is that it seems that the only people allowed to be truly transgressive and also mainstream are the conventionally attractive. We reward handsome and pretty people for "pushing the envelope" because the dopaminergic quality of their face and build allows all the weird stuff to go down easy. That allows those more genetically blessed to be more free to experiment and express their true selves.

In many professions there's some maximum I'd expect, particularly for women. Someone exceptionally hot may have trouble getting taken seriously.

Same is true I'd say in certain creative or deep science positions. If your phd computer genius (which I know is a bullshit label, but people get presented that way to businesses) comes in wearing a tailored suit and well groomed, people are going to be suspicious. If someone looking like RMS shows up, people will belive he's legit. Unfortunately most careers involve some acting.

What you said applies to race and sex. People expect their engineers to look and act like RMS, so minorities tend to have to "prove" they belong.

Remember that a tremendous amount of attractiveness is effort, as opposed to genes.

So it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that the causality might actually run backwards here -- people who want to have a better career put more effort into their appearance.

You know how they say dress for the job you want, not the job you have? Well it's not just your dress -- it's your hair, it's your confidence, it's your diet, it's your glasses, it's your athletic fitness, it's your posture, it's your makeup, it's taking care of your skin.

Considering attractiveness is correlated with wealth, I wonder whether this could be merely a proxy for that. Not that I doubt attractiveness itself matters, just that it would be difficult to control for that and, at least from the abstract, it doesn't look like they did.

I wonder to what extent the effect can be explained by the confounding effect of conscientiousness with respect to personal grooming, dress, physical fitness and apparent health also making one a better economist

They should normalize ugliness against grooming, clothing, and fitness.

How much of this is because you look like a troll and how much of this is because you dress like a troll?

djamn that's the separation of concerns I have not considered

Do you mean a more motivated economist or a better economist?

higher contentiousness = better performance in jobs, research, anything requiring planning, punctuality, and directed effort.

Does contentiousness relate to intelligence (as in having your own opinion?) or to stubbornness (as in not changing your opinion)?

I used to work in management consulting, where there are definite tiers to the firms.

Given a group of people that work at a company, you can probably guess by their appearance what tier they are, e.g. McKinsey will be all fit and attractive and well groomed, big 4 will be above average, etc. There are confounding factors (ambition, self awareness, and whatnot) but when McKinsey says they look for "presence" - being attractive is definitely part of that.

Attractiveness is the ultimate superpower. It’s not just a matter of looks, although that’s certainly a major dimension.

We’re just hard-wired to favor those we find attractive.

To answer this question, you would need to avoid the reality that looks correlate with good genes which correlate with good life outcomes. Too many confounding factors to establish causality

I can't tell from the abstract, but I assume "attractiveness" often also correlates to things like confidence, some degree of good habits/taking care of themselves, etc.--any of which could easily correlate to some degree of career success. I'm guessing the correlation of winning the genetic lottery (specifically in terms of looks) with success is not true in academic careers to anything like the same degree it is in, say, acting. But it probably correlates to some degree--as well as with a lot of other factors that are more intuitively related.

Attractiveness also has a lot to do with the time and place when the term is being used. Your idea of beauty may not be someone else's, and for much of history it may be starkly different to what was considered beautiful.

There is some element of truth to this, undoubtably. But I would add that there are some qualities like facial symmetry and probably facial harmony moreover that I think are universal.

> Too many confounding factors to establish causality

With CRISPR gene editing and a randomized controlled trial it could be sorted out. :P

Hmm... Seems potentially spurious to me. They use personal website pictures, and have people rate them.

They note in the paper that they could be confounded by picture quality, e.g. successful and ambitious people bother to get good photos done / optimize that aspect.

Then they a) say well we don't think that picture quality will have much effect, cite cite and then they say b) it does have a small effect, but we control for it by controlling for picture size, dress code, and whether a person is smiling.

What a reductionist control, and b) contradicts a). There are lots of things like posture, style and conformance to fashions as to what successful economics academics look like that they do not control for

I think this is amazing that this is written by someone in the field, so it's possible it was motivated by personal experience. I just picture someone saying "ugh my peers are only more successful than me because they're more attractive, and I'll prove it!" Not saying I actually think this is what's happening but wouldn't that be amazing

> We document appearance effects in the economics profession. Using unique data on PhD graduates from ten of the top economics departments in the United States we test whether more attractive individuals are more likely to succeed. We find robust evidence that appearance has predictive power for job outcomes and research productivity. Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job, but also for jobs as many as 15 years after their graduation, even when we control for the ranking of PhD institution and first job. Appearance also predicts the success of research output: while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes, it predicts the number of citations for a given number of papers, again even when we control for the ranking of the PhD institution and first job. All these effects are robust, statistically significant, and substantial in magnitude.

The paper is paywalled, but that's the abstract.

I'm curious about how much of that is self-sabotage. I don't think we can rule out self-perception of attractiveness as a confounding variable. Internalized attractiveness? If anyone has a good study about that, I'd be very interested.

Link the paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/km0f8wl27ip9czd/HaleRegevRubinstei...

(From university press release: https://news.ucsc.edu/2021/04/attractiveness-career-success-...)

> I'm curious about how much of that is self-sabotage.

They all came from top-10 departments, so there can't be that much self-sabotage, at least at the beginning.

> Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job

I'm curious how their production differs as undergraduate students to merit the graduate placement, and as graduate students to merit the first job placement. Especially in the context of: > while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes

I'm also curious about correlations with personality factors, since it's known that some personalities are more oriented toward positive appraisal from others (whether this is positive appraisal for looks, or for academic production).

Really reminds me of this short story by Ted Chiang: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...

Being able to groom oneself is a major career booster in most fields. Yes, you can always fall back on talent, but it doesn't hurt to look the part when employers are looking for people to represent them.

I believe looks do matter less in other fields.

OT, but for once, Betteridge's law of headlines is proved wrong. I often do a mental check, and I think this is the first time I've noticed it in a year or so

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

(2021)

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