Pretty Can Hurt Women’s Careers

By Maya Shalam

Beautiful women sail through life with all the advantages in the world, right? That’s what many
of us have been conditioned to believe, but of course, it’s not true. And now there’s research to
prove it — when it comes to the workplace, at least. According to a recent study, attractive
businesswomen are in fact considered less trustworthy, less truthful and more worthy of being
fired than other women.

The researchers, out of Washington State University and the University of Colorado Boulder, call
this the “femme fatale effect” — femme fatale being a term for a seductive yet manipulative
woman. (Think Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat” or Cersei Lannister in “Game of Thrones.”)

“Highly attractive women can be perceived as dangerous,” said Leah Sheppard, an assistant
professor at W.S.U. and a lead author of a paper. “That matters when we are assessing things like
how much we trust them and whether we believe that what they are saying is truthful.”

The study pushes past the more commonly accepted idea that beautiful women are
underestimated at the office to focus on how bias against these women stems from more primal
feelings of sexual insecurity, jealousy and fear.

“For women, there are certain contexts in which they don’t seem to benefit from their beauty,”
Sheppard said, pointing to evolutionary and social factors. As the thinking goes: Evolutionarily,
women have leveraged their looks to attract mates and viewed more attractive women as
competition, Sheppard said. Men, in turn, were drawn to attractive women — but worried that
their beauty might make these women unfaithful.

Those deep-rooted evolutionary instincts can spill over in the workplace — prompting feelings
of jealousy and also suspicion from both women and men that the attractive woman “has used
her sexuality to get promotions, favorable work assignments, etc.,” Sheppard said.

Adding insult to injury, many people are often unwilling to believe that beautiful women are
being stereotyped in this way, Sheppard said. Beautiful women are “going to be challenged in
terms of building trust,” she went on. “That’s not to say that they can’t do it. It’s just that trust is
probably going to form a bit more slowly.”