(A picture of an unattractive person would not provoke suspicion that the person expects to get by on their sex appeal instead of their performance, so "plain" women and men would not be stigmatized for attaching a picture.)
Because attaching a picture prompts the recipient to wonder why, and possibly to make different assumptions about the applicant based on the explanation they come up with, I think the situation is too complicated for it to be possible to draw conclusions from the results. I don't disagree with the researchers' explanation, though. Even when we try to be fair, the idea of an attractive person getting by on their looks is more viscerally offensive, and threatening, when the person is of the same sex. Men might think it's lame and shitty if a woman relies on her looks, but if a man is rising in the office by charming and chatting up female managers, it goes beyond "lame" and becomes a personal threat. Ditto for women. Both sexes "appreciate" sex appeal as part of a charming personality when it appeals to us and stigmatize it as dangerous when it competes with us.
http://www.economist.com/node/21551535 "...when job hunters include photos with their curricula vitae, as is the norm in much of Europe and Asia."
That it's still the norm in Europe is news to me! Certainly not in the UK.
Of course, limiting geography means you're just as likely to be studying culture differences as the underlying topic.
P.S. Apparently I trust HN too much to give me the best article about the topic. The article in The Economist would have been a much better submission.
I think some people saw her, learned what her major was, then concluded it was too good to be true. Also, it was hard for a lot of guys to think with 100% efficiency in her presence.
I wish people thought more highly of men. I think that this kind of sentiment is inexcusable in the workplace. We're (mostly) all adults here. People are perfectly capable of working around attractive people.
If you're an actual post-pubescent person, you could do a simple experiment: Try to do serious work with half the screen playing video of attractive people, then try it with video of three-toed sloths. Do they require the same amount of executive functioning? The same amount of energy? Assuming of course that you're romantically indifferent to sloths, that the number of cuts per second is roughly equal, etc.
Suppressing phylogenetically old parts of the brain is never free, even when it's desirable. Is this sentiment inexcusable in the workplace?
[1] for example: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103109...
I wish people thought more highly of men...People are perfectly capable of working around attractive people.
This was something I observed firsthand. Hardly scientific, of course, but still. I've also experienced palpable disdain and hostility from professors, up until the first test was graded, and they realized I was one of the top scoring students. There's just this slowly fading cultural phenomenon where some people expect certain professions to be populated by males who fit a certain mold.
Yes, people are perfectly capable of working around attractive people. In those contexts, there's time to acclimate and time to get to know them as people. As a college student, there are other contexts where there aren't the same strictures as a workplace and all you have to go on at first is what they look like in cutoff shorts and a "farmer's daughter" getup. (I once saw her have that effect on a visiting prof in that outfit.)
It happens to guys too. At the end of the day, humans are really bizarre creatures.
Do other men really think this way? If so, then I carry a considerable advantage over my peers who are afflicted with diminished mental capacity in the presence of an attractive woman.
I'm a heterosexual male in my mid 20s and attractive women do not phase me at all. After my brain acknowledges the presence of an attractive woman, it simply moves on to the next thing. So what if she is attractive? If you care to take a few passing glances at her... ok, then what? Are you going to stare at her all day? Why? That isn't boring? She's just a woman; one of billions who qualify for the subjective title of "attractive". I just don't understand.
But, I could be wrong too.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...
Yes, I know it's a comedy site and they're over-exaggerating their points, but most of the time they base them on actual research.
I could believe that women tend to discriminate subconsciously against unattractive women; though I don't think the reverse finding would have surprised me either. But did the study actually show that men don't discriminate against attractive women?
edit: the paper is here, it seems to be open access: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1705244
From skimming through, it looks like they don't compare whether the hirer is male or female. But
* Employment agencies prefer no-photos, but don't discriminate between attractive and plain women.
* Companies hiring for themselves don't discriminate between no-photos and plain women, but discriminate against attractive women.
Which is evidence in favour of jealousy: the people who won't work with them don't feel threatened. The paper is considerably more thorough than this though.
I don't know many people who attach a photo to a resume. So if I see a photo on your resume, and you are attractive, I'm probably going to feel like you know you are attractive and are trying to win points with your attractiveness, which will cost you points in my book.
If that theory was true, I would expect attractive males and attractive females both to be discriminated against.
In fact, I'd expect that the exact opposite occurs when the HR person is male: Prefer attractive females, and discriminate against good/successful looking males. It would be interesting to see a study that recorded in each case the gender of the HR person.
We like to think of ourselves as completely objective, but we never are.
Forbes has this habit of taking other people's articles and slapping ads on them. They're robbing original authors of eye balls.
I've recently started applying around using both my linkedin account and also a text version of my resume. Since linkedin is nice enough to show me who has looked at my profile recently, I often see which companies and which person has looked. Because I'm a programmer, often it's a guy reviewing my profile.
I don't have enough data points to be conclusive, but it's looking like I get better results from my text resume (that is, the companies that don't show up as having viewed my linkedin). I was starting to wonder if the photo on my linkedin was turning people away, since the content was generally the same.
It's rather common apparently in Europe though, even expected in some countries, like Germany.
On the subject of "crazy things about job-hunting in Europe," I recently learned that in France, it's expected that you hand-write your cover letter, and HR departments employ people who supposedly can figure out a person's personality and work ethic based on their handwriting.
I can't think why anyone would want to include a photograph of themselves on an application / CV / resumé.
I've taken a bunch of photos for friends for use in their applications. And it's always the same: if they are shy and introverted, they do look like this in pictures. Same applies to extroverted characters.
As far as I know, it's still standard practice throughout most of Asia.
