It’s not what you know. It’s how you look

By Dr. Yanju Liu

A profession often seen as glamourless, accounting evokes visions of drab, grey-suited professionals hard at work reconciling books, verifying invoices and certifying financial statements. But is there more than an affinity for numbers, superb quantitative skills and a sharp eye for details when it comes to making it in the accounting world? A new paper casts an aesthetic lens on the hiring practices of top American business schools to explore whether attractive professors are offered better first school placements post-PhD and achieve tenure faster than their plain-looking classmates.

It's well established by research – and something we all perhaps know intuitively – that good looking individuals are generally more liked, receive better treatment throughout the hiring and evaluation process and even make more money that less attractive ones. Know as the “beauty premium”, attractiveness’ potency is such that just hanging out with the beautiful ones is enough to gain in perceived stature. But could such a shallow criterion actually make or break an academic career in a field considered as objective as accounting?

Using 714 photos and the resumes of accounting faculty members from 93 university websites – including the Businessweek Top 50 2015 MBA Schools – the authors tasked Amazon MTurk to examine the association between facial beauty – measured to eliminating the views of “extreme” judges as well as variations linked to gender, age and ethnicity (with the caveat that racial discrimination remains prevalent) – and the school ranking of a PhD candidate’s first job placement, the time to obtain tenure and the time to secure a full professorship. Conclusion? Good looks do matter a lot, especially early on.

Results show that attractive PhD candidates are more likely to secure that crucial first position and be promoted with the best business schools, as both hiring committees and tenure and promotion committees appear to equate attractiveness with future potential. Despairingly, this trend has been ongoing for decades. Still, all is not lost for those who don’t quite meet classical standards of beauty: if the beauty premium does play an important role in the early stages of an academic’s career, it slowly fades as time goes by, before vanishing once an associate professor seeks to be promoted to full rank.

While it’s heartening to know that, over time, talent, intelligence and competencies trump good looks, the fact remains that the young and beautiful seem to get an early start on the competition. Academia may not judge a book solely by its cover, but physical attractiveness does make the first few chapters of an accountant’s life a bit easier!