Being good-looking does not simply help job seekers, and neither does a degree from an elite university on its own. What employers rewarded was a match: attractive applicants with elite credentials were favoured for higher-status jobs, less attractive applicants from non-elite universities were favoured for lower-status jobs, and candidates with one advantage but not the other lost out for both.
Christopher Marquis of the University of Cambridge, András Tilcsik of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and Ying Zhang of Singularity Academy in Switzerland reported the findings in “Attractiveness and Attainment: Status, Beauty, and Jobs in China and the United States.” The paper was published online in the American Journal of Sociology on February 5, 2024, and appears in the journal’s May 2024 issue.
Earlier research on beauty at work has pointed both ways, with some studies finding an attractiveness premium and others a penalty. The authors argue that looks act as a status signal, and that employers want an applicant’s signals to line up with each other and with the prestige of the job.
Fake résumés sent to 2,095 employers
In China, the team answered 2,095 newly posted job ads on the recruitment site Zhaopin in six cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan and Xi’an. Each employer received one fictitious résumé from a computer science student, identical except for three randomly assigned features: gender, university prestige and the passport-style photo that Chinese résumés usually carry.
The elite applicants came from Project 985 universities ranked roughly 10 to 39, and the others from less elite Project 211 universities. For the attractive version of each photo, a professional retoucher made the eyes slightly larger and rounder and the skin slightly lighter, in line with Chinese beauty ideals, and pretests confirmed that the edited photos were rated more attractive.
The applications drew 193 callbacks, a rate of 9.2%. On their own, looks made no difference (9.2% versus 9.3%), and the elite degree did not help either. But applicants whose looks and university matched were called back 11.7% of the time, against 6.8% for mismatched ones. That means mismatched applicants would need to send about 70% more applications to get one callback, a gap the authors compare to racial gaps found in US audit studies.
The job mattered. For jobs with above-average pay, attractive elite graduates got 24.4% callbacks, compared with 14.1% for the less attractive non-elite graduates. For below-average pay, the pattern flipped: 22.8% for the less attractive non-elite graduates versus 12.9% for the attractive elite ones.
The same pattern among American hiring staff
Photos are not standard on American résumés, so the US arm was a preregistered survey experiment. The final sample of 2,020 people with résumé-screening experience, recruited through Prolific, each rated one candidate profile with a headshot, resembling a LinkedIn page, for either a higher-status or lower-status job.
For the higher-status job, attractive candidates from elite universities got the best ratings, 5.92 against an average of 5.53 for the other combinations. For the lower-status job, less attractive candidates from non-elite universities came out on top, at 6.04 and 6.01 against 5.72. Raters saw matched candidates for top jobs as more qualified, saw matched candidates for lower jobs as more likely to stay committed, and felt more certain about candidates whose signals were consistent.
Neither study found a significant gender difference. The authors note that the US study used only applicants who appear to be white, so it is unclear how the pattern holds for other racial groups, and that they treated attractiveness as a single scale.
Why a single beauty premium is hard to find
Because studies pooled jobs of different status, the matching effect can cancel out, which may explain why earlier work found premiums in some settings and penalties in others. In the Chinese data, attractiveness alone was worth nothing overall, yet for a well-paid job a polished photo plus an elite degree raised the callback rate by nearly three quarters compared with the opposite profile.
Study Details:
- Title: Attractiveness and Attainment: Status, Beauty, and Jobs in China and the United States
- Authors: Christopher Marquis, András Tilcsik, Ying Zhang
- Journal: American Journal of Sociology, Volume 129, Issue 6, pages 1720-1762
- Publication Date: February 5, 2024
- DOI: 10.1086/729834