You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t! If you are too beautiful as a woman, life will work against you and if you aren’t beautiful (by society’s terms) then life will work against you too. The same thing applies to men, but probably not as much as women. I found this great article and video on Newseek that are worth sharing. The video is called ‘Looksism’ Goes Pop. Jessica Bennett is basically pointing out that we are biased against ‘ugly’ people even if we don’t know it. I am going to use the harsh term ‘ugly’ to just make the point of how ridiculous this is. To get a job, people will usually hire good looking applicants; in fact, well-rounded applicants that are good looking are better options than ugly but very intelligent applicants (who may be better for the job). Babies stare at beautiful people a lot more than they stare at ugly people. Teachers give more praise and better feedback to beautiful people.
Are we that shallow? I guess we are that shallow and maybe I do that too. To be honest, when I used to recruit for our company, the way an applicant looked probably did affect my first impression of him or her. But did it determine whether they got the opportunity for the second round of interviews. I really hope not and I don’t believe so. But, I guess the question is, knowing what we know now about the beauty bias for both men and women, what are we personally going to do about it? Well I know that I am going to be more conscious about it. I want to ask myself the question bravely at the right time- is this person’s looks affecting my judgement? I am sure if we ask ourselves this one simple question whether it is about the men or women we date, or whether it is about colleagues that we work with or whether we are recruiting, we can then address this issue upfront. I mean, enough is enough. The world is being ruled by superficial values – how we look, how much money we have, what car do we drive, who do we know. Let’s go back and simplify. Let’s jump out of this shallow cloud and dive back down to Earth. That’s where the soul of humanity is anyway. Do we have a deal?