Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Pretty Women Can’t Get Jobs?

Beautiful women don’t really get all the breaks, new Israeli research suggests.

Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Center found that if you’re female and searching for a job, good looks could actually be a liability.

They applied for 2,500 jobs using fake identities. For each job, they sent an application with a photograph — as is the norm in much of Europe and Asia — and one without.

For men, good looks were an asset — a résumé with a handsome photograph was more likely to get an interview than the identical résumé without. But for women, pretty photographs had the opposite effect. An attractive woman would need to send out 11 résumés on average before getting an interview when applying directly to a company; an equally qualified plain one just seven.

According to this report in the Economist, Ruffle initially considered the “dumb blond” hypothesis, i.e. that people thought pretty candidates looked stupid, but dismissed it because photographs had been selected for both beauty and intelligent appearance. Instead, he concluded that women screen the vast majority of job applications, and it is simple jealousy working against the beautiful.

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.