Reexamining the labor market mechanisms generating the beauty wage premium

This study should be good news for these smoking hot smash train babes. Otherwise it's off to information and data. With thanks to Kim du Toit.

Thank god, a new study on beauty-related pay.

Beauty, Job Tasks, and Wages: A New Conclusion About Employer Taste-Based Discrimination

Todd R. Stinebrickner, Ralph Stinebrickner, Paul J. Sullivan

NBER Working Paper No. 24479
Issued in April 2018
NBER Program(s):Labor Studies 

We use novel data from the Berea Panel Study to reexamine the labor market mechanisms generating the beauty wage premium. We find that the beauty premium varies widely across jobs with different task requirements. Specifically, in jobs where existing research such as Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) has posited that attractiveness is plausibly a productivity enhancing attribute—those that require substantial amounts of interpersonal interaction—a large beauty premium exists. In contrast, in jobs where attractiveness seems unlikely to truly enhance productivity—jobs that require working with information and data—there is no beauty premium. This stark variation in the beauty premium across jobs is inconsistent with the employer-based discrimination explanation for the beauty premium, because this theory predicts that all jobs will favor attractive workers. Our approach is made possible by unique longitudinal task data, which was collected to address the concern that measurement error in variables describing the importance of interpersonal tasks would tend to bias results towards finding a primary role for employer taste-based discrimination. As such, it is perhaps not surprising that our conclusions about the importance of employer taste-based discrimination are in stark contrast to all previous research that has utilized a similar conceptual approach.

Excerpt

3.3 Employer Discrimination in Wages on the Basis of Attractiveness

The fact that the attractiveness premium is not explained by differences in job tasks between attractive workers and other workers implies that, for at least some subset of job tasks, attractive workers receive higher wages than other workers. In this section we take advantage of our unique data to identify the set of tasks where this is the case, in order to provide evidence about the presence of employer taste-based discrimination. Our test is based on the insight that employer taste-based discrimination would tend to produce attractiveness premiums across all types of jobs, while a worker productivity-based explanation would produce attractiveness premiums in only a subset of jobs: those jobs where the presence of substantial interpersonal interactions provides an opportunity for attractiveness to potentially enhance worker productivity.

We operationalize our test by estimating wage regressions after stratifying our sample into four groups on the basis of jobs’ primary tasks, two groups where the primary task involves interpersonal interactions (high skilled People and low skilled People) and two groups where the primary task does not involve interpersonal interactions (high skilled Information and low skilled Information). Table 5 shows wage equation estimates for our linear attractiveness specification from column 2 of Table 2. Providing very strong evidence that the attractiveness premium should not be attributed to an employer taste-based explanation, the results show that attractiveness has a strong effect on wages in jobs that specialize in People tasks, but not in jobs that specialize in Information tasks.