[philh]

> The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.

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.

[sliverstorm]

Alternative theory:

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.

[philh]

Apparently both with-photo and without-photo are common in Israel, where the study was conducted.

If that theory was true, I would expect attractive males and attractive females both to be discriminated against.

[sliverstorm]

Possibly, although most guys don't seem to be particularly in tune with which other guys are attractive.

[kstenerud]

It's likely we're seeing some vestiges of evolutionary psychology (an attractive female as a threat to other females) that are subconsciously affecting judgment in an area that, though no threat actually exists, is recent enough in our evolutionary history that we're as yet maladapted to it. In this case, it's not so much jealousy as protecting one's turf.

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.

[tadfisher]

This makes sense. Employment agencies are much more open to liability for discrimination from sheer volume alone, thus they train their PMs to follow the law and ignore things like gender, but they may be more likely to ignore applications with photos out of concern for said liability.