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It’s an outdated trope that women only rise in the workplace because of their looks. A new study may put this position into practice.
A new study finds that men actually benefit from physical attractiveness in school and the workplace more than women.
Researchers from the Polish Academy of Sciences examined data on more than 11,000 Americans over a 20-year period from adolescence to adulthood, including assessments of their appearance, information on their educational and professional achievements, and their earnings.
They found that people who were rated as more attractive at age 15 were more likely to outperform their parents in earnings and achievements once they reached their 30s. This effect was much stronger for men than for women, especially in the area of education.
Being attractive gives you a better chance of outperforming your parents in several ways: education, work, and earning. This effect applies to everyone, but the results are especially pronounced for men
Experts have argued that it is Evolutionary perspectiveAn attractive appearance may be a sign that a person is a suitable, suitable and disease-free partner.
Furthermore, people tend to rate traditionally attractive people more highly Smart, trustworthy and talented.
In the new study, the researchers set out to explore the physical effects of these supposed biases.
To do this, they pulled data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (add health for short), a Long-term study Followed about 20,000 people from adolescence to adulthood. Some dropped out over time, so the new study includes data on 11,583 people.
These numbers include physical health data, demographic information, socioeconomic data, and, oddly enough, ratings of physical attractiveness.
Study participants come in every few years to answer Add Health’s questions.
At each visit, interviewers were asked to rate participants on their attractiveness—a five-point scale ranging from “very unattractive” to “very attractive.”
Interviewers did not receive specific instructions about the criteria they should use to evaluate participants. But since studies have shown that observers are multiple Tendency to agree In person attractiveness ratings, Add Health ratings likely give an accurate picture of how people view each volunteer.
The team behind the study looked at how interviewers rated participants’ appearance when they came in for their first visit as teenagers, and how their lives progressed about 20 years later.
Physical attractiveness at age fifteen made a big difference twenty years later, even after researchers took into account other factors known to influence a person’s socioeconomic status — things like childhood health, neighborhood conditions, and parents’ socioeconomic status.
This research aims to look at how someone’s aesthetic attractiveness affects their upward mobility, but in theory, the opposite effect is possible, the study authors wrote: upward social mobility could lead to greater attractiveness.
Researchers compared people’s attractiveness as teens to their success as adults. On the one hand, this helps ensure that the results they obtained were based on a person’s natural appearance and not on the effects of wealth, such as plastic surgery. But on the other hand, measuring someone’s attractiveness as a teenager may not give an accurate measure of how they look as an adult.
Once someone becomes wealthy, they can buy nicer clothes, a gym membership, or even have plastic surgery to enhance their physical attractiveness.
For this reason, they focused on physical attractiveness as assessed at age 15.
While gains during puberty may lead to hotter hair, face, and body in adulthood, money cannot influence someone’s appearance as a teenager. Therefore, by limiting the assessment of physical attractiveness to adolescence, researchers can be quite confident that it affects social mobility, and not the other way around.
The results appeared this month in the journal Social Science Quarterly.
Analyzing the effects of these scientific classifications of attractiveness by gender revealed a curious effect: Men seem to benefit more from people who they think look good.
“For males, we observe a social mobility gradient of physical attractiveness for all three measures of mobility; that is, those rated as attractive have higher mobility opportunities than those rated as average,” the study authors wrote.
With each step up the attractiveness ladder, men tended to increase this advantage.
“Among females, the gradient is weaker with respect to educational mobility and income between generations, and there are no significant differences in physical attractiveness categories with respect to occupational mobility.”
The new results contradict A Stady from Scotland in 2013, which found that the attractiveness of teenage girls was an important factor in influencing educational outcomes.
One major limitation of this study, which the team acknowledges, is when they first assessed the subjects’ appearance.
For example, a person who was rated as unattractive in adolescence may later flourish.
Of course, this action is just one data point in the picture of how attractive people are in the world. The study authors point out that the specific measures they used to assess achievement could play a role in the results.
They also note that the differences they observed are more complex than simply “attractive” versus “unattractive.” People who were rated as “very unattractive” had worse outcomes than those who were rated simply “unattractive,” so future researchers should note that these categories should not be combined.
(Tags for translation) Daily Mail