Study shows beauty and gender matter
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

Discussions of "The Beauty Myth," gender wars, queen bees and "Men are from Mars" dominate popular culture. Yet while much of the attention has been focused on the social impacts of beauty and gender stereotypes, an Andrew Young School economist is approaching the subject in an entirely new way.

Ragan Petrie is finding that how people act on their perceptions of beauty and gender can have lasting, major economic impacts. Previous labor market studies have shown that these long-held stereotypes can have an effect on earnings. Yet only in the last few years have economists begun to seriously consider their causes and consequences, says Petrie, an assistant professor in the Environmental Policy Program who uses economic experiments to examine the impacts of social preferences on economic decision-making.

In "Beauty, Gender and Stereotypes: Evidence from Laboratory Experiments," Petrie and co-author James Andreoni explore the impact of beauty and gender in a public goods experiment and find that appearance can matter, although not always the way one might expect. For example, beautiful people earn more money in their study, but only if their decisions are private. Once their decisions are made public, this "beauty premium" disappears.

"We find that beauty and gender have significant and sometimes unexpected effects on earnings," they write. "Furthermore, the behaviors and apparent stereotyping we find may provide some clues into why gender and beauty are so important in the labor market." People often work in teams, where certain individuals can "set the tone" for the work group. Their research finds that gender and beauty may affect which people in the group are emulated by others, how much retribution they may take against shirkers and how cooperation is used to reward generous actions. "In the end, the beauty and gender of the individuals in the group will affect the cooperation and success of the group as a whole and the earnings of its individual members."

The full text of Petrie's and Andreoni's article is available online at www.gsu.edu/~ecorap/research/beauty.pdf.