Researchers Bradley Ruffle and Ze'ev Shtudiner, who presented a paper at the Royal Economic Society's annual conference this week, sent more than 5,000 job resumes to over 2,500 advertised job openings in Israel.
In each pair, one CV was without a picture, while the other almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive-looking man or woman or a plain-looking man or woman.
Attractive men received a response to 20% of their applications, compared with 14% for men who put no picture and 9% for men with plain looks. But attractive women were called for interview for a position less often than plain-looking women or women who had no picture on their resume.
Women who put no picture on their CV were 22% more likely to receive a response than women with a plain picture and 30% more likely than women with an attractive picture.
When a company was recruiting directly, attractive women received a response rate half that of plain and no-picture women.
In a survey of company recruiters, 96% turned out to be women, typically in their 20s and single. These qualities, the authors argue, are more likely to make them jealous when confronted with an attractive woman in the workplace - but not an attractive man - and help to explain the double standard.
The resumés of attractive males received a 19.9% response rate, nearly 50% higher than the 13.7% response rate for no-picture males and more than twice the 9.2% response rate of plain males. It follows that an attractive male needs to send on average five CVs to obtain one response, whereas a plain-looking male needs to send 11 for a single response.
But among women, the study indicates that, contrary to popular belief, attractive women are called back for a position less often than plain women as well as women who had no picture on their resumé. Among female candidates, no-picture females have the highest response rate, 22% higher than plain females and 30% higher than attractive females.
These findings on penalisation of attractive women contradict current psychology and organisational behaviour research on beauty, which associates attractiveness, male and female alike, with almost every conceivable positive trait and disposition.
As a result, attractive and plain women alike are better off omitting their photograph from a resumé, since it decreases their chances of getting a response by 20-30%.
The number of attractive women that were subjected to discrimination varied on who was hiring them, the research shows. When employment agencies received resumes for positions, attractive female candidates were no worse off than plain candidates and penalised only modestly compared with no-picture females.
Unlike Anglo-Saxon countries such as the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, it isn't taboo in Israel to embed a headshot of oneself in the top corner of one's job resumé. Rather, the choice to include a photograph on one's job resumé is left to the candidate, with the result that some do, while others don't. This fact makes Israel an opportune location to explore the effect of a picture and its attractiveness (or lack thereof) on the likelihood of being invited for a job interview.
