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by swengw 4719 days ago
It doesn't address the real gender discrimination issues, but having gender-balanced HR departments could have helped Kim O'Grady. Currently, if you include your photo in your resume, being a beautiful (rather than average-looking) woman seems to lower your chance of getting an interview [1].

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21551535

1 comments

Having a culture in which it was normal to post resumes with photographs would also have benefited Kim O Grady...

Either way, HR didn't hate him because he was beautiful, and there are conceivable reasons why even a gender balanced HR department might screen out candidates posting their "beautiful" photos along with an applicatiom that don't involve petty jealously.

If photos are relatively rare in a culture receiving applications or the photos used are glamorous model applications, one could even argue that it's a reasonable alarm about a person's willingness to nakedly milk their looks. Even if that isn't the case, a non-partisan observer might [over]correct a perceived (and often real) tendency for beautiful people to receive more favourable treatment in some environments. Maybe they could apply the same criteria to tall men too...

photos aren't terribly relevant now, since you can just google the person's name and find a pic of them in most cases