When beauty doesn't pay at work

BY FIONA SMITH

While it is true that good-looking women are more likely to get that high-paying job, they are also more often the victims of workplace discrimination and stereotyping, writes Fiona Smith.

Gorgeous people are more likely to get the job, get paid more and get more positive attention throughout their lives. Lucky them. They won the genetic lottery.

But before the rest of us start to call around for quotes from plastic surgeons, we should be aware that the flipside of the beauty bonus is significant penalties in the form of unwanted and inappropriate attention, as well as discrimination in the workplace.

People are judged by their appearance, whether they are pretty or plain, handsome or haggard. It is wrong, and when it takes place in the context of work, it is often illegal.

In the United States, 33-year-old Debralee Lorenzana is suing Citigroup, alleging she was sacked last August from one of its New York branches for filling out her corporate attire too well, distracting her male colleagues and supervisors.

"The reality is I'm a size 32DD. I'm very skinny and then I have curves. So of course, on my body, the turtleneck is going to make it more noticeable. But I'm not showing cleavage. We wear jackets," she said.

Lorenzana complains she is being discriminated against because of her body type. She says the move to dismiss her came after her second complaint to the company about the comments from managers and their admonitions not to wear turtleneck sweaters and pencil skirts.

Her former employer counters that she was sacked for performance reasons, which she denies.

If her story sounds a little far- fetched, don't scoff to Anne, a 31-year-old finance manager who left her former information-technology company in distress two years ago after being told she should disguise her E-cup chest with scarves whenever her United States manager visited the Sydney office from his base in Singapore.

Anne, who does not want her real name used, had been having problems with the manager, alternating between finger-prodding bullying and phone calls "for a chat" at all hours of the day and night.

The issue eventually blew up when, during a particularly stressful day at work, she refused to accept some incomplete paperwork from a client. The manager unleashed a barrage of personal abuse and she complained to her human resources director.

At mediation, after the female HR director asked Anne to detail her issues, her manager was asked for his perspective. "He said he felt very uncomfortable in one-to-one situations because of some of the tops I was wearing," she says.

At the time, being casual Friday, Anne was wearing a cardigan over a sleeveless top and jeans. Her arms and chest were completely covered. Only a burqa might have been be more effective in disguising her curvaceous frame.

The HR manager suggested she take Anne to the Tie Shop to buy a scarves to cover up, so the manager would feel less "intimidated".

"That is when I realised that the HR woman was not there for me. She was just looking after the company," Anne says.

In desperation, she phoned her former boss and pleaded for a job.

Two months later, she was gone.

Anne says she did consider taking legal action, but she decided not to because of the potential damage to her future employability.

She need only look to Lorenzana to appreciate the dangers, who has been warned against talking to the media by her new employer, JPMorganChase, for fear of bringing the bank into disrepute.

On top of that, an attempt has been made to discredit her story by digging up the tale of how she went on a reality TV show six years ago and had plastic surgery in an attempt to look like a cross between Pamela Anderson and Carmen Electra.

But the fact that she succumbed to the all-pervasive pressure to look a certain way does not mean it is then acceptable to discriminate against her because of her shape.

Sara Charlesworth, principal research fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, says the experience of these two women shows how male the corporate work environment remains. "The normative body in the workplace is the male body, and women who deviate from that stand out," she says. "Women who look more like men and behave like men are seen as more acceptable."

As Anne says angrily: "Somehow, it would be great if we could get the message across to these men that we are what we are, and just get on with your bloody jobs instead of being perverts."

Interestingly, there is some evidence that benefits accrue to people who are attractive, as long as they are not too attractive.

Research conducted by Ohio Wesleyan University in 1985 showed that people with "moderately attractive" physiques, as opposed to "knockouts" or those who were "not so attractive", were assumed by others to have more socially desirable characteristics and to experience more happiness.

Very attractive people were expected to be vain, egotistical, materialistic and snobbish.

The "beauty bonus" is the advantage that attractiveness confers. Attractive men are more likely to be hired, whereas facial prettiness appears to have no impact on hiring women.

In a poll of MBA graduates in the US conducted in 2006, attractive men were paid more at recruitment and those benefits increased over time. For attractive women, the beauty bonus kicked in later in their careers.

Looking at the 10 years to 1982, men were found to earn US$2600 (NZ$3782) and women US$2100 more on average for each unit of attractiveness in a five-point scale.

Sometimes the discrimination even comes down to hair colour.

A lecturer at the Australian School of Business, Geni Dechter, says her analysis of US data shows blonde college-educated women are paid 9 per cent less at recruitment than their brunette counterparts. But as they progress through their careers, that disadvantage disappears (five years into the job) and then they tend to be better at getting promotions, with their salaries increasing more quickly than their brown-haired sisters'.

Dechter says this may be because blondes have to work harder to beat the "dumb blonde" stereotype. Fairfax

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