[clavalle]

So the theory presented here is:

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Attractive women are disproportionately hired and promoted.

Many of these attractive women are not intelligent enough for upper management therefore there is a limit to how high these women reach in an organization.

At the same time, less attractive women languish in the lower rungs, far below their intellectual potential.

Furthermore, this phenomena does not affect men because they are judged based on their ability.

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Well, there seems to be a lot of assumptions baked into this theory, but one I think is most likely to sink it is this one: Attractive women are, on average, less intelligent and capable than their less attractive counterparts. Seems a bit prejudicial to me.

Edit: You all are right, of course -- I shot from the hip. While it would be relatively easy to fill a single position with someone who is both attractive and intelligent, when taken across a workforce (assuming it is a widespread practice -- widespread enough to skew the curve) you would end up with a smaller pool when taking anything but intelligence into account.

I've got to wonder, though, how ubiquitous it is when hiring for skilled positions that can eventually lead to management and how much those types of factors differ compared to men?

[eurleif]

The assumption is that women selected for attractiveness are, on average, less intelligent than women selected for intelligence. That doesn't mean attractive women are less intelligent than unattractive women.

[nathan_long]

Yes. More generally, the principle here is you can only optimize for one thing.

[gyom]

I'm glad someone pointed out that reasoning flaw right away.

[jere]

>Attractive women are, on average, less intelligent and capable than their less attractive counterparts. Seems a bit prejudicial to me.

That's not the argument being made. The author is only claiming that hiring by a metric other than competence will lead to worse hires than hiring by competence alone.

It would be like if you hired the people with the shortest first names. Unless short names happened to be correlated with job performance, you're essentially picking names out of a hat. Pointing this out doesn't mean you think people with short names are less intelligent.

[tempaccount9473]

> Well, there seems to be a lot of assumptions baked into this theory, but one I think is most likely to sink it is this one: Attractive women are, on average, less intelligent and capable than their less attractive counterparts. Seems a bit prejudicial to me.

No, that's not what's being postulated.

Let's stipulate for a moment that attractiveness and intelligence are completely independent. Imagine you have a pool of 1000 men and 1000 women with a standard distribution of looks and ability. Let's say you hire the top 10% of the men in terms of ability, and you also hire the top 10% of women in terms of attractiveness. When it comes time to promote your executives based on ability, you will have 10 men in the top one percent of ability to choose from, as opposed to 1 woman with the same qualifications.

[electromagnetic]

IIRC data correlations from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (with data sets based on ~15,000 adolescents) showed that those who are rated very unattractive averaged an IQ of 94.2 where as those rated very attractive averaged 100.7. Interestingly Male IQ's differed by 8 points, where as women's differed by an average of 6 points.

The fact is there are conditions, specifically Down's, that have an effect on both physical development and mental development.

I think saying attractive women are disproportionately hired and promoted is misleading, because we're now ignoring actual social factors at work rather than simply attractiveness.

If we're going to look at stereotypes then lets look at why female CEO's exhibit male-typical personality traits, and associate that with the known tendency of employers to hire people they can relate to. Or the "catty" female stereotype. Or numerous other stereotypes that aren't actually contrary to evidence, because evidence says hiring women for attractiveness is exactly what employers should be doing, because on average it works.

The question the original article begs to question is "are employers hiring less skilled attractive employees over more skilled unattractive employees" and the article didn't answer it beyond pandering to the "ditzy blonde" stereotype of women in the office.

I think things like second generation college students perform better and that education may not cross gender gaps as effectively, correlated with less women being second generation college graduates is going to have a bigger impact on the supply of competent women into the higher echelons of a work force than men hiring with their dicks.

Today women tend to outnumber men in colleges, which in 40 years time might mean that this wave of second/third generation female graduates might also be dominating our CEO seats.

I'm pandering to a half dozen stereotypes here for the exact reason that we presently know nothing on why we have fewer females in top positions.

[cosmie]

From my interpretation, that wasn't an assumption of the theory. All else being equal, there is presumably a similar distribution of intelligence among attractive females as there is among less attractive females.

However, due to attractiveness having a heavier weight than ability in the hiring decision, you hire disproportionately from the full distribution of attractive female candidates, rather than just the "above-average" sides of both distributions. This leaves an artificially scarce supply of female employees competent enough for upper-management level.

In contrast, if men are hired more on competency and less on looks, then you're not arbitrarily splitting your candidate pool into two distributions - one of which (the unattractive) you are very unlikely to hire from - and you're likely to hire all competent males vs. some competent and a few that really shouldn't have been hired but looked good.

[vor_]

It's a speculative article, but it does address your last point:

"In no way am I suggesting that attractive women are necessarily incompetent. But I am saying that the greater emphasis on looks we place on women shrinks the pool of exceptional leaders we might get tomorrow."

[randren]

I agree with the synopsis of the presented theory. I also agree that it would be prejudicial to assume that attractive women are less intelligent and capable than their less attractive counterparts. However, I don't see how that assumption is baked into the theory.

Even if, on average, the more-attractive candidates were more intelligent and capable (purely for the sake of the argument), the theory presented seems to support the notion that, despite the hypothetical averages, there would still be a pool of less attractive, highly-qualified candidates held back. It seems to me that, if that were true, they would, under the presented theory, be replaced by attractive candidates who in fact do not qualify for upper management.

[wtracy]

I interpreted the essay differently.

The article claims that, early on in the hiring process, women get filtered based on attractiveness. As they move up in the organization, they then get filtered based on ability.

So, the reason that we see so few female CEOs is that the survivors have been filtered for attractiveness and ability, while the men have only been filtered based on ability.

Sounds plausible to me, but I'm not in good a position to say.