Sex, Drugs and Economics: The beauty premium at the intersection of race and gender

Friday 22 October 2021

The beauty premium at the intersection of race and gender

I've written a lot about the beauty premium in labour markets (see the links at the end of this post), including most recently earlier this week. However, most studies that I am aware of look at the beauty premium for a single ethnic group, or even a single gender, and don't consider that the premium might different systematically between ethnicity-gender groups. So, I was interested to read this recent article by Ellis Monk (Harvard University), Michael Esposito, and Hedwig Lee (both University of Washington, St. Louis), published in the American Journal of Sociology (ungated version here). Their premise is simple (emphasis is theirs):

Given the racialization and gendering of perceived beauty, we should expect such interactions. In short, while Black men may face double jeopardy on the labor market (race and beauty)... Black women may face triple jeopardy (race, gender, and beauty).

Monk et al. use data from the first four waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), for 6090 White, Black or Hispanic working people who appeared in all four waves of the survey. Like other studies, they measure beauty based on the ratings given by the interviewers, and then they derive an overall beauty score for each research participant. You might be concerned that the race/gender of the interviewer matters. However, Monk et al. note that:

...the vast majority of interviewers (with measured demographic characteristics) are White (just under 70%), and female. Furthermore, the sample of interviewers was highly educated, with 20% having a postgraduate degree, 28% having a college degree, and 31% having some college experience. Again, this interviewer pool represents actors that respondents may typically encounter as gatekeepers in the labor market. This is helpful for the purposes of our study...

They find few differences in attractiveness ratings given by different race/gender interviewers, although:

Black female interviewers appeared to give slightly lower ratings overall than White women (except for when evaluating Hispanic respondents)... Black male interviewers tended to give lower scores to male respondents regardless of their race/ethnicity.

Monk et al. don't feel a need to condition their results on the race/gender of the interviewers, but since they are evaluating beauty based on four different interviewers' ratings, it probably isn't a big deal.

Anyway, onto the results, which can be neatly summarised by their Figure 2:

Looking at the figure, they find that there is a beauty premium for all six race/gender groups, but the beauty premium differs among those groups. In particular, the beauty premium is largest for Black men and women. However, expressing it that way doesn't quite capture what is going on. It isn't so much a larger positive beauty premium, as a larger penalty for unattractiveness. Notice that the disparity in income between Blacks and Whites is much smaller for the most attractive people than for the least attractive people. In fact, the incomes of the most attractive Black women are higher on average than the incomes of the most attractive White women (controlling for age, education, marital status, and other characteristics). The differences are quite substantial. Monk et al. note that (emphasis is theirs):

White males with very low levels of perceived attractiveness are estimated to earn 88 cents to every dollar likely to be paid to White males who are perceived to possess very high levels of attractiveness. This is similar in magnitude to the canonical Black-White race gap, wherein using the same set of controls we find that a Black person earns 87 cents to every dollar a white person makes.

Sizable income disparities are observed among subjects judged to be least and most physically attractive in each other subpopulation analyzed as well. The ratio of predicted earnings of individuals at the 5th percentile of perceived attractiveness compared to individuals at the 95th percentile of perceived attractiveness is 0.83 among White females; 0.78 among Hispanic males; and 0.80 among Hispanic females. Again, note that returns to attractiveness are most pronounced among Black respondents: Black females at the 5th percentile of attractiveness ratings are estimated to earn 63 cents to every dollar of Black females at the 95th percentile of attractiveness. Black males at the 5th percentile of attractiveness are expected to earn 61 cents to every dollar earned by Black males at the 95th percentile of attractiveness.

Clearly, these results are important for the future measurement and understanding of the beauty premium in labour markets. As Monk et al. note, they also contradict Daniel Hamermesh's speculative comment in his book Beauty Pays (which I reviewed here) that:

...the effects of beauty within the African-American population might be smaller [than among whites]...

Monk et al. conclude that:

...perceived physical attractiveness is a powerful, yet often sociopolitically neglected and underappreciated dimension of social difference and inequality regardless of race and gender. Further still, its consequences are intersectional...

We should be accounting for that intersectionality in future studies of the beauty premium.

[HT: Marginal Revolution]