There's a scene in the 2006 movie "The Devil Wears Prada" where Anne Hathaway's character, Andrea Sachs, gets a makeover that literally makes her better at her job.
A trip to the fashion closet and the beauty department at Runway, the film's thinly veiled stand-in for Vogue magazine, transforms Andy from an ugly-duckling failure of a second assistant to the beautiful, capable confidante of the magazine's formidable editor, Miranda Priestly.
The scene is a pivotal moment in the plot -- looking good is part of the job at a fashion magazine, after all -- but it also nicely illustrates the real-life fact that when women in any profession spend more time on their appearances, it actually does cause people to take them more seriously.
That's according to a new study from sociologists Jacyln Wong at the University of Chicago and Andrew Penner at the University of California, Irvine, who found that attractiveness is a key factor in how well young professionals between the ages of 24 and 32 do at work.
Wong and Penner's work, which will appear in the June issue of the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, found that attractiveness helps both men and women at work -- but not in the same ways.
While a man can realize some professional benefits from being naturally attractive, for a woman it depends almost entirely on how much effort she puts into makeup, grooming and other efforts to look good.
Research shows that attractive people have an easier time getting hired, get better performance reviews, are promoted more often and make more money than their less attractive counterparts. What Wong and Penner found is that being considered attractive enough to command a wagepremium at work doesn't necessarily require perfect bone structure.
Job status is often affected by the amount of time a person spends getting ready in the morning. And this is especially true for women.
"Although appearance and grooming have become increasingly important to men, beauty work continues to be more salient for women because of cultural double standards with very strictprescriptions for women," the paper says.
A trip to the fashion closet and the beauty department at Runway, the film's thinly veiled stand-in for Vogue magazine, transforms Andy from an ugly-duckling failure of a second assistant to the beautiful, capable confidante of the magazine's formidable editor, Miranda Priestly.
The scene is a pivotal moment in the plot -- looking good is part of the job at a fashion magazine, after all -- but it also nicely illustrates the real-life fact that when women in any profession spend more time on their appearances, it actually does cause people to take them more seriously.
That's according to a new study from sociologists Jacyln Wong at the University of Chicago and Andrew Penner at the University of California, Irvine, who found that attractiveness is a key factor in how well young professionals between the ages of 24 and 32 do at work.
Wong and Penner's work, which will appear in the June issue of the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, found that attractiveness helps both men and women at work -- but not in the same ways.
While a man can realize some professional benefits from being naturally attractive, for a woman it depends almost entirely on how much effort she puts into makeup, grooming and other efforts to look good.
Research shows that attractive people have an easier time getting hired, get better performance reviews, are promoted more often and make more money than their less attractive counterparts. What Wong and Penner found is that being considered attractive enough to command a wagepremium at work doesn't necessarily require perfect bone structure.
Job status is often affected by the amount of time a person spends getting ready in the morning. And this is especially true for women.
"Although appearance and grooming have become increasingly important to men, beauty work continues to be more salient for women because of cultural double standards with very strictprescriptions for women," the paper says.
