Blog : The Ugly Side of Good Looks

by Ed Zwirn on May 8th, 2014

It can feel disheartening in a world increasingly sensitive to the feelings of others to be part of a group struggling under the weight of stereotype and have no one empathize with your plight. Yet hardly a day goes without membership in this group impacting my life.

You have to understand it from my point of view: All my life I have had offers thrown at me, offers which for the most part I have politely taken up, offers of money, power and all the trappings that go with them. Everyone from the gullible investor next door to his widowed neighbor has seen me as his or her salvation, a role to which I am eminently suited.

All of this should make me happy, and yet this sense of attainment rings hollow, for I know that it is only my maleness and exceptional good looks that have gotten me as far as I have made it in life. Rather than being proud of my many accomplishments, my charitable endowments, my lavish lifestyle and even my batcave, I sometimes can't give myself a break. Is it my chiseled features and striking hunk frame that have led to my becoming a billionaire or has all this net worth been driven by the content of my character? I would love to believe the latter.

It is fittingly a group of female academics that have pricked apart this festering wound on the male psyche and highlighted the situation of attractive males like me for the unenviable plight that it is. Their paper, Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men, has been published in March's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our paper provides concrete proof that gender discrimination exists in the context of entrepreneurial pitching," says Alison Brooks, an assistant professor of Harvard Business School who coauthored the paper with Laura Huang, an assistant professor at the Wharton School.

As part of their study, Brooks, Huang and a team of female researchers examined video recordings of 90 randomly selected pitches from three actual pitch competitions held in various locations in the United States over a three-year period. In each competition, a panel of "angel" investors had judged the pitches, awarding startup capital to the winners.

The researchers then recruited a separate panel of 60 seasoned angel investors to watch the videos and code them across several measures, including attractiveness. These "angels" were left in the dark about the actual competition results.

Not surprisingly, the findings showed a significant relationship between entrepreneurial gender and success, with the male entrepreneurs 60% more likely to win awards than their female counterparts.

So far so good, but here's where the discrimination gets ugly: It seems that a much higher premium is being paid to male attractiveness. Among the male entrepreneurs in the study, who are already the victims of positive prejudice, those deemed stud-muffins by the evaluators were 36% more likely to achieve pitch success.

The results bear testament to the damage done to generations of men taught to value their looks above all else. It is noteworthy that for the female entrepreneurs in the study, their looks had absolutely no effect on the success of their pitches.

As the results show, women have long ago freed themselves from the slavery of being slaves to fashion. They may well be discriminated against on a gender basis, but as we all know, women are valued for their minds alone (the content of their character, if you will) and their attractiveness (or lack thereof) has no impact upon their likelihood of success.

This fact of life may have constituted a gut feeling of mine for some time, but this study offers evidential proof of the travails of good-looking men. Even as I write this, nine-year-old boys are being painstakingly trained in the art of looking their best. There is plenty of time for these young men to learn algebra, if they have to, but it is never too early for parents to get their sons looking good and knowing how to primp for that venture capital sales pitch. Let some ugly person do the due diligence later on.

These young boys grow up to quickly appreciate the value of their good looks. And, while it would be wrong to deprive good-looking men of our birthright, some thought needs to be given to what men stand to lose in their pursuit of remunerative looks. Will we handsome men always feel somehow cheated of the privilege of having actually earned our lavish lifestyles and adoring retinues?

Men have much to learn from the female portion of the species, who are discriminated against only because they are women and not on the basis of their looks.