Blonde, beautiful and bright?
Reading the holiday edition Economist, they add in a load of great "wider reading" articles including this one on Beauty and Success entitled "To those that have, shall be given". Sub titled, ‘The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand.’
They surveyed salaries for men and women in a range of countries and found that beauty has a premium and ugliness is penalised around the salary norm.
China:
men -25% and +3%
women - 31% and + 10%Britain:
men - 18% and +1%
Women - 11% and +1%USA / Canada:
men - 9% and +5%
women -6% and +4%
Quite telling! But what made me laugh was that Dr Daniel Hamermesh of the university of Texas studied Dutch advertising firms and showed that those with the most beautiful executives had the largest size-adjusted revenues - a difference that exceeded the salary differentials of the firms in question.
And so the lesson for 2008 is that if you want to grow your revenues, hire beautiful folk to work for you!