It’s a fact of life, all over the world. Good looking people (men and women) get paid better than plain peers. In China it’s possible to advertise stating a preference for gender stressing the importance of appearance so no surprise there’s a bias there.
In the paper highlighted today Congcong Li (et al) from the Singapore Management University’s School of Accounting wanted to test if there was measurable bias in the financial analysts profession based on gender and looks. Moreover the researchers then wanted to investigate if the U.S. experience was different from findings in China.
The profession of financial analyst is supposed to be based purely on smarts and is notoriously competitive so it’s a particularly fertile place to test for bias i.e. there should be a very low incidence of gender and looks-based preference. Let’s see…
The study was based on 1,121 U.S. analysts and 443 Chinese analysts observed between 2013 and 2015. Attractiveness was graded by an uninterested group roped in using Google’s Mechanical Turk who were unlikely to have known any of the subjects whose photos were taken from either Linkedin pages or photos supplied to Institutional Investor Magazine in the U.S. or New Fortune Magazine in China.
The paper is well worth a read for some of the snippets along the way; for example noting Piper Jaffray have the best looking male analysts and CLSA have the best looking female analysts in the U.S. or that overall UBS has the most attractive U.S. team.
To the main conclusions though. Female analysts are more likely to be voted All-Star analysts in the U.S. BUT more attractive ones less so. In China the reverse applies. Females are less likely to be voted All-Stars but more likely if they’re more attractive. The researchers leave it to the reader to ponder the reasons for this (chipping in a few suggestions) but make the point there’s no societal norm [I’d throw in ‘yet’ here] regarding gender and looks bias.
One of the most interesting asides in the paper is the average number of years experience for the respective analyst groups. In the U.S. it was 8.5-years, in China a mere 2.2-years. China, at least in regard to availability of experienced analysts, has quite some catching up to do.
You can access the paper in full via the following link Gender and Beauty
Happy Sunday.