Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.. Attractive women should not include a photo with a job application

AT WORK, as in life, attractive women get a lot of the breaks. Studies have shown that they are more likely to be promoted than their plain-Jane colleagues. Because people tend to project positive traits onto them, such as sensitivity and poise, they may also be at an advantage in job interviews. The only downside to hotness is having to fend off ghastly male colleagues; or so many people think. But research by two Israelis suggests otherwise.  
Bradley Ruffle at Ben-Gurion University and Ze’ev Shtudiner at Ariel University Centre looked at what happens when job hunters include photos with their curricula vitae, as is the norm in much of Europe and Asia. The pair sent fictional applications to over 2,500 real-life vacancies. For each job, they sent two very similar résumés, one with a photo, one without. Subjects had previously been graded for their attractiveness.
At first, Mr Ruffle considered what he calls the “dumb-blonde hypothesis”—that people assume beautiful women to be stupid. However, the photos had also been rated on how intelligent people thought each subject looked; there was no correlation between perceived intellect and pulchritude .For men, the results were as expected. Hunks were more likely to be called for an interview if they included a photo. Ugly men were better off not including one. However, for women this was reversed. Attractive females were less likely to be offered an interview if they included a mugshot. When applying directly to a company (rather than through an agency) an attractive woman would need to send out 11 CVs on average before getting an interview; an equally qualified plain one just seven.
So the cause of the discrimination must lie elsewhere. Human resources departments tend to be staffed mostly by women. Indeed, in the Israeli study, 93% of those tasked with selecting whom to invite for an interview were female. The researchers’ unavoidable—and unpalatable—conclusion is that old-fashioned jealousy led the women to discriminate against pretty candidates.
So should attractive women simply attach photos that make them look dowdy? No. Better, says Mr Ruffle, to discourage the practice of including a photo altogether. Companies might even consider the anonymous model used in the Belgian public sector, where CVs do not even include the candidate’s name.

Nice Girls Don't Ask

Men and women are still treated unequally in the workplace. Women continue to earn less, on average, for the same performance, and they remain underrepresented in top jobs. Research has shown that both conscious and subconscious biases contribute to this problem. But we’ve discovered another, subtler source of inequality: Women often don’t get what they want and deserve because they don’t ask for it. In three separate studies, we found that men are more likely than women to negotiate for what they want. This can be costly for companies—and it requires management intervention.

The first study found that the starting salaries of male MBAs who had recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon were 7.6%, or almost $4,000, higher on average than those of female MBAs from the same program. That’s because most of the women had simply accepted the employer’s initial salary offer; in fact, only 7% had attempted to negotiate. But 57% of their male counterparts—or eight times as many men as women—had asked for more.

Another study tested this gender difference in the lab. Subjects were told that they would be observed playing a word game and that they would be paid between $3 and $10 for playing. After each subject completed the task, an experimenter thanked the participant and said, “Here’s $3. Is $3 OK?” For the men, it was not OK, and they said so. Their requests for more money exceeded the women’s by nine to one.

The largest of the three studies surveyed several hundred people over the Internet, asking respondents about the most recent negotiations they’d attempted or initiated and when they expected to negotiate next. The study showed that men place themselves in negotiation situations more often than women do and regard more of their interactions as potential negotiations. (See the exhibit “Can We Talk?”)

When to Drop an Unprofitable Customer

As Tommy Bamford and Jane Oldenburg drove into the visitor section of Westmid Builders’ car park, Jane pointed out the man they had come to see: Steve Houghton, Westmid’s purchasing executive. He was in front of the headquarters building, waving a greeting. Jane waved back to her friend, whom she had known for decades, but Tommy scowled. He wasn’t looking forward to this visit. “Oh, come on,” Jane said, nudging him. “Look how friendly he is.”

Tommy was a director and Jane was the Midlands regional sales manager for Egan & Sons, a supplier of doors and staircases to Westmid for 63 years. The two executives had to pause before crossing the gravel road that ran through Westmid’s grounds, because of the steady stream of trucks traveling to and from construction sites around Birmingham and all the way to London. Tommy knew that despite the heavy traffic that April morning, Westmid was hurting from the economic downturn in the UK. The company was building only half as many housing units this year as it had during recent boom times. With the steep falloff, Westmid was no longer Egan’s biggest customer, but it still retained considerable clout. Too much clout.

“I’m flattered by such an august delegation,” Steve said. “Shall we start with a tour?” Jane, a tiny and exuberant blonde with a boy’s haircut, happily agreed. She had been here many times, of course, but Tommy was not a regular. Steve chatted away as he shuttled them in a little electric vehicle past warehouses and outbuildings.

Jane had promised Tommy that a visit to Westmid would change his view of the company. But he could not shake his newfound awareness of how much money Egan was losing with Westmid—the account’s ratio of operating income to sales was a negative 28%. The two companies had enjoyed a smooth relationship for decades, but Tommy strongly believed the time had come to terminate it.

Steve kept glancing at Tommy during the tour. “You look pale,” Steve said at one point. “I hope my driving isn’t making you queasy.”

“That’s quite all right,” Tommy said. “I’ve got a strong stomach.”

The Power of Customer Costing

Egan & Sons, founded in Birmingham in 1908, was hardly a sleepy company. With three efficient plants staffed by 3,000 employees, it had reinvented itself to become an innovative manufacturer of modular steel staircases and fiberglass doors. Its accounting system, however, remained simple and traditional. The weaknesses became apparent only in the mid-2000s, when Chinese companies began to encroach on Egan’s low end, severely undermining profitability.

With careful study, Tommy had figured out that the company’s costing system had made it blind to its own operations: It allocated factory overhead to products as a percentage markup over direct labor costs, and corporate overhead as a percentage of sales. Thus, the company could not accurately identify its costs for serving individual customers or for designing and producing all the new goods it had recently brought to the marketplace. The lack of traceability and transparency extended to the costs for specialized equipment that was used only for particular products or customers