Looks: The next chapter in civil rights

boston.com:

Beauty may only be skin deep, but that’s plenty deep enough to cost you a job, a promotion, or the training to get one. Marie Smith, a Hooters waitress, who was 5-feet 8-inches and 132 pounds, was placed on involuntary weight probation until she could fit into a company uniform: the only sizes available were small, extra small, and extra extra small. Brenda Lewis was an Iowa hotel desk clerk who lost her job despite excellent performance ratings because she appeared “tomboyish,” and lacked the “pretty” “Midwestern girl look” that the operations manager thought appropriate. Sharon Russell was expelled from a nursing school not because of her record but because of her weight and because administrators worried that she would provide a poor “role model [for] good health habits” when counseling patients.

Are these unusual cases? The research available suggests not. In a recently released Newsweek poll, over half of corporate hiring managers believed that unattractive but qualified employees would have a harder time getting hired, and two thirds thought looks would affect performance ratings. When asked to rate nine qualities relevant in employment decisions, appearance came in third in importance, below experience and confidence, but above educational credentials.

Other studies similarly confirm the pervasiveness of the “beauty bias.” About the same proportion of employees report discrimination based on appearance as discrimination based on race and sex. And economists have quantified a substantial “plainness penalty” even in occupations like law, where looks generally bear no relationship to competence. In educational settings, a cottage industry of studies have shown that teachers give lower grades to unattractive students; students give lower course evaluations to unattractive teachers.

Part of the problem is the lack of consensus that any of this is a problem. “So you Want to Hire the Beautiful” ran the title of one Business Week column. “What’s wrong with that?”

What’s wrong is the same thing that’s wrong with discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or gender. Prejudice based on looks rather than performance violates principles of equal opportunity and social justice that this nation has fought hard to establish. Beauty bias is the last frontier of acceptable bigotry. Except in a few localities, it is now perfectly legal. That needs to change. In schools and workplaces, people should be judged on how they perform, not how they look.

All too often, discrimination based on appearance, like other forms of bias, rests on inaccurate stereotypes. Assumptions that overweight individuals are lazy, undisciplined, or unfit are a case in point. In one typical example, a woman failed to get a job as a Texas Bus Lines driver because a company doctor assumed that her weight would prevent her from effectively protecting passengers in an accident. He later acknowledged that she had no health problems and that he had performed no agility tests; he had based his conclusion on watching her “waddling down the hall.” Similarly, Jazzercise denied a franchise to Jennifer Portnick, a 240-pound San Francisco aerobics instructor, on the grounds that she lacked the right image — “fit” and “toned.” But in fact, she was both. She worked out six days a week and had no trouble attracting students. All she wanted was to be “judged on my merits not my measurements.”

Read it all.