Beauty and employment in China: Having better educational credentials reduces appearance discrimination among men but not among women; the beauty premium is larger for vacancies with higher remuneration

Beauty and job accessibility: new evidence from a field experiment. Weiguang Deng, Dayang Li, Dong Zhou. Journal of Population Economics, August 7 2019.https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-019-00744-7

Abstract: This study uses a field experiment to resolve the difficulties of quantifying personal appearance and identify a direct causal relationship between appearance and employment in China. The experiment reveals that taste-based pure appearance discrimination exists at the pre-interview stage. There are significant gender-specific heterogeneous effects of education on appearance discrimination: having better educational credentials reduces appearance discrimination among men but not among women. Moreover, attributes of the labor market, companies, and vacancies matter. Beauty premiums are larger in big cities with higher concentrations of women and in male-focused research positions. Similarly, the beauty premium is larger for vacancies with higher remuneration.

Keywords: Appearance discrimination Beauty premium Pre-interview stage Field experiment

Check also Natural Tendency towards Beauty in Humans: Evidence from Binocular Rivalry. Ce Mo et al. PLOS March 1, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0150147

Abstract: Although human preference for beauty is common and compelling in daily life, it remains unknown whether such preference is essentially subserved by social cognitive demands or natural tendency towards beauty encoded in the human mind intrinsically. Here we demonstrate experimentally that humans automatically exhibit preference for visual and moral beauty without explicit cognitive efforts. Using a binocular rivalry paradigm, we identified enhanced gender-independent perceptual dominance for physically attractive persons, and the results suggested universal preference for visual beauty based on perceivable forms. Moreover, we also identified perceptual dominance enhancement for characters associated with virtuous descriptions after controlling for facial attractiveness and vigilance-related attention effects, which suggested a similar implicit preference for moral beauty conveyed in prosocial behaviours. Our findings show that behavioural preference for beauty is driven by an inherent natural tendency towards beauty in humans rather than explicit social cognitive processes.