In the eye of the promoter? How faculty ratings of attractiveness matter for junior academic careers

Abstract

We investigate whether junior researchers’ attractiveness matters for obtaining an academic job post-PhD in a specific field within the social sciences, using faculty ratings on photographs along with data on publications, quality of PhD-granting university and employment type. The use of faculty ratings rather than external rating platforms allows for a closer match to a real-life academic setting. We find a significant association between faculty-perceived attractiveness and the probability of junior female researchers being in academic positions. A one standard deviation increase in the faculty attractiveness rating is associated with an increase in female junior researchers’ academic job holding by 25 % of the mean. This association is equally strong for the full sample of females and a seasoned subsample of females, observed at least 5 years post-PhD. We show that faculty ratings are different from general perceptions, the latter being irrelevant for junior researchers’ academic job holding. We also find that research productivity or access to high-quality coauthorship networks cannot explain the association. Collegiality, inferred using facial action coding of the photographs, is associated with the probability of females being in academia, but does not alter the association between faculty perceived attractiveness and females’ chances of an academic job post-PhD.