Pretty and Paid
How facial appearance influences managerial pay awards
Psychologists have found that employees may receive higher wages if they have a face for business.
It has long been known that attractive people receive higher wages. But in a new study, researchers have found that how dominant and trustworthy you appear can also have an impact on your pay packet.
Laura Fruhen of the University of Western Australia in Perth, along with her colleagues in Scotland, asked over 1400 men and women to view photographs of job applicants and to award those applicants a salary on an agreed pay scale.
Applicants for a shop floor manager position were awarded a salary between £23,000 and £29,000. Applicants for a senior manager role were placed somewhere on a pay scale from £83,000 to £89,000. All the volunteers had to go on were the facial photographs of the applicants.
Of course, the jobs weren’t real and neither were the applicants. The photographs were taken from a publicly accessible database. Each had been rated by another set of volunteers for attractiveness, dominance, and trustworthiness.
Facing up to Pay Award Bias
The results of the experiment indicated that all three aspects of appearance were linked to pay awards for both types of job. Attractive, dominant, and trustworthy applicants tended to receive a higher pay award.
The researchers calculated a “pay premium” to explain the impact of appearance on salary. A pay premium is the amount of the awarded salary that can be directly attributed to a particular characteristic. For example, an attractive face was worth an extra £187 per month, a dominant face £177 per month, and a trustworthy face a massive £243 per month.
A trustworthy and dominant appearance predicted a higher salary for senior managers than shop floor managers. Conversely, attractiveness was more important for the customer-facing role of shop floor manager — beautiful shop floor managers received a pay premium of £238 per month, while a pretty face was only worth an extra £140 per month for senior managers.
In their paper, the researchers say:
Because descriptions of a retail manager’s job entail touring the sales floor and dealing with sales, facial attractiveness might be rewarded more in these lower-level management positions, compared to a senior position that is more exclusively focussed on managerial than sales tasks.
In other words, the volunteers in Fruhen’s experiment probably assumed that an attractive sales manager would be more valuable to their hypothetical company than an attractive senior manager, and that this value should be reflected in a more generous compensation package.
The Real World?
You may be wondering if the results of this experiment translate to the real world. There’s no way to know for sure. Usually, when employers are deciding where to place an applicant on a pay scale, they have more to go on than a facial photograph. They can take into account a person’s experience, their performance at interview, and whether their CV was scribbled in orange crayon on toilet paper. Perhaps when applicants are judged for real jobs, their appearance has less of an impact than Fruhen’s experiment would have us believe.
Fruhen also found that female applicants were awarded higher salaries than male applicants, which does not seem to reflect reality. A recent report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission suggests that male managers in the UK earn an average of £25 per hour, while women in equivalent positions earn only £16 per hour. The gender pay gap is much smaller for junior sales roles, but also favours men.
Still, Fruhen found that the pay premium based on appearance was larger for women than for men, which rings true. An attractive man stood to earn £143 more per month than a less attractive man; the pay premium for an attractive woman was £162 per month.
The authors of the study acknowledge that their results may not tell us how pay is awarded in the real world, but maintain that their data “illustrates what impact facial features could in principal have on pay outcomes”. Their results are perhaps a worst case scenario, but imply that we are subject to biases that it would pay to resist.
Fruhen, L. S., Watkins, C. D., & Jones, B. C. (in press). Perceptions of facial dominance, trustworthiness and attractiveness predict managerial pay awards in experimental tasks. The Leadership Quarterly. Read summary
For an audio version of this story, see the 1 December 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
