Blonds have more fun (or rather, they get paid more)

There's a lot of evidence that a beauty premium exists in the labour market. That is, more attractive people earn more (see here and here, as well as here for my review of Daniel Hamermesh's excellent book Beauty Pays). Taller people also earn more (see here), so beauty is not the only physical attribute that attracts a labour market premium. What about hair colour?

In a short 2012 article published in the Journal of Socio-Economics (sorry I don't see an ungated version), Nicolas Guéguen (Université de Bretagne-Sud) reported the results of an experiment he ran to find out. Guéguen used wigs to randomise the hair colour of waitresses at several restaurants in Brittany, and measured the effect on whether the customers gave a tip, and how much they tipped. He found that:

Men gave tips more often to a waitress with blond hair and, when they did, they gave her a larger amount of money. No hair color effect was found with female patrons. In this experiment, we found that the average rate of customers who left a tip to a blond waitress is 25.2% higher when compared with the three other combined hair color condition. The systematic use of this technique could increase their income from 1173.73€ to 1244.97€ a month (from 8.38€ to 8.89€ per hour).

Blond waitresses earned statistically significantly more than waitresses with black, brown, or red hair (there were no differences between the other three hair colours). You might worry that the waitresses acted differently when wearing the blond wig, but if that were the case, then there would have been differences in the tips earned from female customers (and there weren't). The experimental setting and the randomisation of wig colours across different days also solves much of the problem of correlation here. These results are plausibly causal.

You might be willing to call this out as discrimination. However, as Daniel Hamermesh notes in his book, customers may be willing to pay more for the amenity of dealing with an attractive person (although, Hamermesh doesn't put it in quite those terms). Customer preferences matter, and that is one explanation for the higher wages for more attractive people. Employers pay attractive people more because they attract more customers. However, that argument doesn't really extend to the tipping behaviour of customers. So, it is an important finding that customer willingness-to-pay for physical attributes is also picked up by what they actually pay (as a tip), which is a more direct measure. It would be interesting to see if this extended to other physical attributes (attractiveness, height), although the challenges of designing an experiment for those attributes are much greater!

Read more:

• The beauty premium in undergraduate study is small, and more attractive women major in economics
• The beauty premium in the LPGA
• The beauty and height premiums in the labour market