EING beautiful pays off. Economists
have found that men with above-average looks are paid about 5
percent more than those with average appearance, while those who are
below average in looks have wages 9 percent below the mean.
But is this because of discrimination or productivity?
Clearly, being attractive is part of the job description for some
occupations — think of supermodels or television anchors. On the
other hand, one might think that beauty would not have much effect
on the productivity of, say, newspaper reporters or professors.
However, research by two economists, Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff
Biddle, has found that beauty has a substantial payoff across a
variety of occupations, even those where it doesn't seem to be
inherently valuable.
Perhaps beauty contributes to productivity in subtle and indirect
ways. Homely sales representatives might not be able to sell
products as effectively as attractive ones, while good-looking
reporters might have an easier time finding willing news
sources.
On the other hand, it might be that bosses award beautiful people
with pay raises independently of performance.
It's hard to disentangle these two hypotheses. If attractive
people are able to work better with customers, colleagues and
clients, thereby producing more value for employers, one might argue
that it is appropriate to reward beauty.
But if there is little relationship between measures of job
performance and beauty, then higher wages for attractive people
would amount to discrimination based on irrelevant
characteristics.
To decide between the productivity hypothesis and the
discrimination hypothesis one needs data on job performance.
Recently Mr. Hamermesh, a labor economist at the University of
Texas at Austin who has long studied beauty and labor markets, wrote
a paper with an undergraduate economics major, Amy Parker, that
investigates the effect of beauty on a particular measure of
performance: teaching evaluations for college professors.
The economists collected teaching evaluations for 463 courses
taught by 94 faculty members at the University of Texas at Austin,
along with some characteristics of the instructors, like sex, race,
whether they were on tenure track, and whether they were educated in
an English-speaking country.
They asked six undergraduate students to rate the photographs of
the professors on a 10-point scale and used the average measure as a
beauty score. The student ratings on the beauty scale were highly
correlated with one another, suggesting that they were measuring the
same aspects of appearance.
According to the economists' statistical analysis, good-looking
professors got significantly higher teaching scores. The average
teaching evaluation was 4.2 on a 5-point scale. Those at the bottom
end of the attractiveness scale received, on average, a teaching
evaluation of about 3.5, while those on the top end received about
4.5.
Other variables that positively influenced teaching ratings were
being a native English speaker, being a non-tenure-track faculty
member, and being male. The first fact is hardly surprising, the
second is explained by the fact that non-tenure-track faculty
members are often selected primarily for their teaching ability, but
the third is a bit surprising.
On closer investigation the economists found that good looks were
significantly more important for men than women in producing high
teaching evaluations. The same effect was found in earlier research
relating wages to beauty: being good-looking, or at least not being
bad-looking, is significantly more important for men than for
women.
There are various ways these results might be biased. Suppose
professors who are well organized and tidy put more care both into
choosing their photos and in organizing their courses. Then
better-looking photographs would be correlated with higher teaching
ratings.
To check for this sort of problem, the authors separated out
"formal" pictures (men with neckties, women with jacket and blouse)
from informal ones. The results didn't change.
There are even more subtle effects that might be present. Maybe
those who value beauty want to take art appreciation courses, and
this love of beauty influences their subsequent ratings of their
professors.
Luckily, several of the courses were taught by multiple
instructors, so the authors could examine differences in ratings
while controlling for the courses selected. Again, the results
stayed essentially the same.
The bottom line is that better-looking professors get higher
teaching scores, all else being equal. To the extent that teaching
is an important component of job performance, and to the extent that
teaching evaluations accurately measure performance, basing salary
on measured teaching performance implies a significant wage premium
for beauty, even for college professors.
The really tough question is whether being beautiful truly
increases teaching performance — that is, helps the students learn
more — or whether the students are just reacting to an irrelevant
characteristic.
As Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker put it, "What if students simply
pay more attention to good-looking professors and learn more?"
This effect would be a true productivity effect. If a television
anchor's looks allow him or her to attract more viewers, that makes
that person more valuable to the network. If a professor's looks
help students learn more, then we might expect that aspect of job
performance should be rewarded.
Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker lead off their paper with a quote
from the supermodel Linda Evangelista: "It was God who made me so
beautiful. If I weren't, then I would be a teacher."
But it appears that the same physical attributes that made Ms.
Evangelista a successful model would also contribute to her success
as a college professor. At least the students might stay awake in
class.
Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and
information management at the University of California at
Berkeley.