Attractive female students do well academically compared with unattractive women, US study finds

Looks don't seem to matter, at all, for male students

(Getty Images)

Dear all male students: you’re fine. Dear unattractive female students: you may be in trouble. Attractive female students, however? Read on.

It has been jokingly suggested those who do not have the smarts should be glad to have looks on their side to get them through life. Somewhat troublingly, though, it seems this is no longer anecdotal and is, in fact, true to real life if this one study’s results are anything to go by.

At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, this week, two professors from Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado, US, claimed to have discovered students who are physically attractive get higher grades - and go on to earn more money - than those who are ‘unattractive’. More startlingly? This only applies to females.

Yes, you read that right. Professors Rey Hernández-Julián and Christina Peters put forward their paper, Student Appearance and Academic Performance, in which they compared the academic performance of students in online classrooms - where students are not visible to lecturers - to ‘real-life’ classrooms.

Firstly, the pair had people from outside the university rate the attractiveness of student ID photos on a scale of one to ten. They then examined just over 168,000 course grades awarded to the students, using factors such as American College Testing (ACT) scores - a ‘college readiness assessment’ used as a standardised test for high school achievement and higher education admissions - to control for student academic ability.

Secondly, the economists took advantage of the institution's online classes and, comparing similar groups of students, found the “grade punishment” for unattractive women disappeared in online education, obviously because they cannot be seen.

On the whole, the study outlines how its first set of results indicated female students with below-average ratings of appearance had “significantly worse grade outcomes.” Male students, on the other hand, saw “little return to their appearance” in person or online.

The paper continues: “We then include student fixed effects and estimate whether the return to appearance varies between in-class and online environments. Here, we find an improvement in appearance has a smaller impact in online classes than in traditional courses.

“We interpret this result as evidence that the return to appearance is more likely a result of discrimination than a reflection of otherwise unobserved productivity.”

In an email to education news site Inside Higher Ed, Hernández-Julián described the study’s results as “troubling” and looked at explanations as to how the authors came to the conclusion, one of which, he said, was that professors invest more time and energy into good-looking students, therefore contributing to their academic performance.

Coupled with this, he also said it seems professors reward the appearance with higher grades given identical performance. On the whole, he added: “Given our growing understanding of the prevalence of implicit biases, professors make small adjustments on both of these margins.”

Concluding, Hernández-Julián acknowledged how there are tools in place to address and police the presence of “implicit racial bias” in everyday life, and said: “Similar tools might be useful in other environments where other implicit biases are prevalent, such as colleges and universities.”