When Glasses Land the Gig: Employers Still Choose Workers Who 'Look the Part'
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Before we met her, one of the board members said, "I was told that it always works out that if this person is frumpy and wearing glasses then we should believe her."
She was frumpy. Wore glasses. And 100% correct on her TV time buying recommendations.
-- Leon Black
https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=curb-your-enthusiasm_08_09_198...
I would do experiments and wear them for a couple weeks to a month then go back to contacts and observe the difference.
I work in tech.
"it's amazing how by just adding glasses you went from stoner to professor"
Looking the part is worth some money! This of course contributes to gender imbalances in software.
I'm fully aware that these metrics are easily broken. Best eng I ever met dressed and talked like a complete hillbilly. Best female eng I ever met looked homeless, and indeed, did a lot of crack at one point.
This applies to male engineers too, except there's other more important signals there.
So if your remark is, "In my limited experience I've worked with only 10 female engineers and the eight good ones all wore dark clothing and wear glasses. That's a funny and unlikely distribution!" then you're good.
If your remark is "I can determine if a female engineer is any good based on whether or not she is wearing dark clothing and glasses" then you probably have no business working in the field at all.
Which parts? The "men and women communicate differently" part or the "women are neurotic" part?
And if the former, do you take it as far as "Better not hire women, because it's all guys here, and we don't want to have to learn how to communicate with them?"
"Women are neurotic" is talking about the neuroticism trait. Women also score higher on average on agreeableness, for example. That's hard data, spoken in unflattering terms.
The former just means you need communication standards that are balanced.
An example a friend. Branches of her family are very wealthy almost old money. She could take something out of her closet and go to a party thrown by old money, fit right in and no one would suspect she's broke.
Don’t get me wrong, when I was younger it annoyed me much more. However now I accept that at some level it’s just part of the “human social dance”. Given that large societies, governments, corporations, etc all exist and can function shows that there’s something to it. Who knows, perhaps Neanderthals didn't do these social rituals and that prevented them scaling social networks and eventually dying out.
This is really interesting because not so long ago, photos were frowned upon on resumes because they were too obvious a path to racial, gender or class-based discrimination (not that names wouldn't often give it away but still). So that some companies would discuss removing photos or even names.
Now photos are a good way to keep the recruiting process honest by avoiding someone else doing the interview - other than the candidate. Aaaand perhaps discrimination is encouraged again (?) with things like "looking the part" - and no doubt age? Suprised this paper doesn't mention that? How about a tie? Is discriminating on the basis of tie-wearing okay? A fundamental problem with class-based discrimination law: eyeglasses-discrimination is most likely fine.
But some of what the research "uncovers" is really just good marketing: "For graphic designers, [...] have a high quality, professional-looking photo (with a small plus for glasses). Other hacks for programmers: [...] keep a computer visible". I removed the bits about "female" and "beard" - also marketing but less legally acceptable.
"having particular characteristics is comparable to a 5 percent boost in pay" and "0.3 percent increase in the stars [...] rating". Now that one is shocking and mostly invalidates the study. Because normally good marketing is worth a lot more than that. That hints to me that customers are actually not paying attention to photos? I suspect it's much more extreme in Bad and Great photos (Great not in Professional but in Fitting.)
> freelancers who “look the part” are more likely to be hired*
...to be hired? This surprises me, a good hiring process would mitigate the effects of this bias somewhat, no?
No, but almost none of them are “good” if “good” is defined as “eliminates all influence of biases irrelevant to performance such that superficial things like appearance play a role not explicable by their ability to predict performance.”
> No
Agreed! Some are better than others.
> if “good” is defined as...
Oh, I never defined "good" that way. Keyword being "mitigate" (you replaced it with "eliminate"). Apologies for your confusion.
> expressed surprise that any bias effect was left at all
Nope, if you scroll up you'll see that "somewhat" word there (you replaced it with "at all").
If you only expect mitigation, there would be no basis for surprise, of any degree, at the mere fact of the effect existing.
That's what the "somewhat" is for. Apologies again for your confusion.
The issue is the expression of surprise with the mere statement that the effect exists. I’m not confused, you said two things that don't make sense together in one post, each of which is perfectly clear.
Agreed! I'm glad you now understand. I'm surprised it wasn't somewhat mitigated (first post).
How do you judge that it wasn't, as there is no information as to what the base rate would be if it wasn’t “sonewhat mitigated” by hiring processes.
This is not the goal. The goal is to bring people on board who will successfully utilize your resources to bring success to your organization.
Eliminating bias is a red herring. You’re better off trying to increase your bias so that it statistically gets you a higher chance of hiring the people you want.
> You’re better off trying to increase your bias
Care to elaborate? That sounds like a terrible idea to me, I'd prefer to hire people based on their skills, not my biases. From the study:
> we do not find a strong correlation between “looking the part” and job performance
...hiring based on biases didn't help.
Find the right vector to bias on.
But whatever the internet is for arguing. Were they ranked globally? Did they place top 8 at worlds?
If they were, and they answered 37, then I might question my understanding of math.
TL;DR there's a fairly significant correlation with white collar work and corrective lenses.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5382686/ looks like an interesting, more robust study on statistical correlations between Myopia and IQ, but I haven't read the whole thing yet
Call it a failure-of-imagination on my part, but I can't see any good reason for having a law like that; it gives of the vibes of wanting to protect an establishment based on discrimination.
But given that traditionally you always have a job interview before being hired, I don't think that there's much discrimination going on: your face will be known sooner or later anyway.
I'm glad IQ tests are banned for employment purposes.
I'm not disputing that. I just think it's dehumanising to reduce someone down to a single number, especially when so many other factors about a person need to be taken into consideration.
My moral-outrage here is my impression that the OP thinks IQ is all that matters, or that it's valid to make significant life-impacting and (business-impacting) decisions based solely on that number. To me, it's same bad-idea as the UK's "11+" exam system (fortunately now long abandoned) that practically determined someone's entire life based on a single exam taken at age 11.
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Also, I find it somewhat amusing that the more someone cares about high IQ scores, the lower their EQ scores tend to be.
A large part of the risk for me was I discovered I can get prescription safety glasses, and if I can't see without glasses I will never risk forgetting to put on safety glasses when I need them.
You can even move your eye around while the laser is shaping your cornea, since the laser has the ability to keep track of it and move along with the eye.
One of the best decisions I ever made, in terms of making life more convenient, especially physical activities.
As far as I know, they can adjust for reading distance but you may have to make a choice in terms of what they distance they optimize for. I know people who got surgery after 40 (when your lens tends to be less pliable) that had one eye set for near-sighted and one for far-sighted.
Evidence shows that not getting enough sunlight when young is what causes myopia, as there is a gene involved in stopping the process of natural eye lengthening that is enabled by sunlight. This need not necessarily correlate to excessive work, as children don't play outside for a variety of reasons.
And also having 18 hours of darkness in winter
> we do not find a strong correlation between “looking the part” and job performance
The stat seems plausible if you replace "freelancer" with "independent contractors". Although some quick googling surfaces stats closer to 10-20% for the percent of workers who are contractors.
(The majority of these contract jobs aren't ones you would find on Upwork, though)