Lookism: Why Does Beauty Discrimination Still Exist?
The psychology of pretty privilege • Lookism and the "-ism" family of discrimination • How to fight beauty bias
Imagine visiting Chicago, USA a century ago. Smartphones hadn’t been invented yet and smallpox hadn’t been de-invented yet (boo). However, toilet paper advertisements proudly proclaimed “Now 100% splinter-free!” (woo, progress!)
You’re walking down a Chicago street, minding your own business, when a policeman walks up from behind and arrests you. He bellows:
Stop right there, criminal scum! You violated Article XXXVIII of the 1881 Chicago Municipal Code, §1612. Pay the court a fine or serve your sentence. Your stolen goods are now forfeit.
Your crime? Being ugly.
Starting with San Francisco in 1867, several U.S. cities passed “unsightly beggar ordinances” that banned beggars, the physically disabled, and the visibly diseased from public spaces. The U.S. state of Pennsylvania took it one step further: it passed an unsightly beggar ordinance that covered the entire state and all its cities, and furthermore banned people with cognitive disabilities from public.
Today, we’ve re-branded “unsightly beggar ordinances” into “ugly laws.” Here’s an example of Chicago’s ugly law:

Chicago repealed its ugly law in 1974, and the United States made it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities in 1990. In less than one generation, we went from mandating discrimination against disabled people to banning it (woo, progress)! However, it’s still legal to discriminate against someone for being ugly (boo).
What is Lookism?
Lookism is discrimination on the basis of beauty (or ugliness). There’s no official definition, so you’ll encounter synonyms such as:
Pretty privilege (focusing on facial attractiveness)
Body privilege (focusing on shapes and proportions from the neck down)
Beauty bias
Ugly tax
Lookism is one of the biggest issues lurking in the Taboo Tunnels beneath Leadership Land. Last time we visited, we published a 3-part series on shamecrastination. We’re back in the Tunnels today to explore a different taboo: how pretty privilege biases us toward attractive colleagues, whilst the ugly tax causes prejudice against unattractive co-workers. Lookism influences whom we hire in the Interview Mountains, whom we promote to the apex of Executive Mountain, and who sexually harasses whom in the Straits of Conflicting Interests. In other words, lookism affects virtually all personnel-related decisions we make in Leadership Land.
Despite its importance, you can’t talk about lookism at work. It’s unprofessional to admit that your pulse quickens whenever George rolls up his sleeves to expose his muscular forearms. You can’t compliment Sandra on that form-fitting sundress unless you want to risk a sexual harassment lawsuit. So we all participate in the polite fiction that we leave our libidos at home.
The Psychology of Pretty Privilege
We pay lip service to meritocratic and just societies. We dream of building an organization where people will not be judged by the beauty of their faces, but by the content of their character; the depth of their wisdom; the extent of their knowledge, skills, and abilities.
While the conscious side of the brain is thinking about these noble endeavors, the unconscious side of the brain runs various systems on autopilot: Heartbeat.exe, Digestion.exe, Do_I_Need_To_Pee?.exe, etc. One of these autopilot systems makes rapid, involuntary judgments about people when we glance at them:
Recognition: Is the visual data a human, animal, or inanimate object?
Identification: Is this person familiar, or a stranger?
Implicit bias: What characteristics/labels do I automatically attach to this person based on stereotypes of the social groups to which they belong?
Disposition: Is their face serene or clouded by emotion? Does the facial expression convey sadness? Anger? Malice?
Posture: Is the body language open or closed (e.g. arms crossed)? Are they relaxed or coiled up for fight-or-flight?
Shapeliness: How symmetrical is their face? What are their body proportions? Are they rotund, thin, missing a limb, missing a tooth?
Blemishes: How even is their skin tone? Are there any irregularities that suggest an infectious disease?
Our brains make these judgments in a split second. It’s automatic and irresistible. When you walk into a meeting with a dozen people and scan the room, your brain processes a vast amount of information in mere seconds. If the system detects an anomaly – e.g. if a golden retriever were sitting in the chair where your boss normally parks their posterior – your brain’s autopilot system would alert you with a feeling of unease and befuddlement.
On the other hand, if your autopilot system detects nothing unusual, it remains silent. You’d walk into the meeting without realizing that your mental machinery is working hard in the background. You’d take your seat without appreciating that your brain just effortlessly completed an incredible task that baffles all of the world’s supercomputers (for now).
The Trouble with Involuntary Judgments
This autopilot system is useful for daily life, but it also undermines our attempts to build a fair and meritocratic society. When your brain analyzes someone’s face to establish their identity, it’s concurrently evaluating how attractive they are (symmetrical faces are generally better-looking). Our brains can even measure beauty from a silhouette; women with low waist-to-hip ratios (hourglass shape) and men with high shoulder-to-waist ratios (V-shaped torso) are conventionally attractive1.
Our brains’ ability to instantly recognize people, evaluate emotions, and detect danger is also the source of racism, sexism, lookism, and other forms of discrimination.
The ability to judge beauty is so ingrained that newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces over unattractive faces. Ever notice how heads turn when an attractive person walks into the room, or how people avert their eyes when passing a toothless beggar at the street corner? That’s because our brains reward us by emitting feel-good chemicals for interacting with attractive people, and punish us with uneasy sensations for interacting with repulsive people. It doesn’t have to be an engaging interaction, either; a mere glance will trigger beauty bias! One study found that the reward centers of our brains light up when we make eye contact with an attractive person, while a failure to make eye contact leads to a feeling of disappointment.
“Easy on the eyes” is an idiom for someone attractive, but its meaning is quite literal from a neurological perspective!
Lookism and the Other “-isms” of Discrimination
Lookism bears a family resemblance to sexism, racism, ageism2, ableism, and the rest of the -isms, but lookism has the distinction of being legal in most jurisdictions. Like other members of the discrimination family, lookism follows the same general pattern on a macro, society-wide level (NOT a micro, individual level):
First meeting – The horns and halo effect causes positive and negative first impressions of someone to “spill over” into their other characteristics. In other words, people jump to conclusions. In the case of lookism, the angelic halo of someone’s good looks causes others to treat them better than they deserve. The demonic horns of someone’s ugliness causes others to treat them worse than they deserve.
Feedback loop – Attractive people start with a small amount of preferential treatment, but confirmation bias influences other people to pile on more. When ugly people make mistakes, confirmation bias invites other people to heap abuse on them. What begins as a tiny advantage or disadvantage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy3.
Differential outcomes – Small individual differences accumulate over the years until pretty privilege becomes visible on a societal scale:
Attractive people are perceived to be more intelligent.
Teachers treat good-looking students better and give them higher grades.
Good-looking people get tons of benefits in the workplace:
They’re invited to more interviews
They receive more job offers*
They’re promoted more quickly*
*with notable exceptions – more on that laterThey earn more money
In mock-trial studies, juries are more likely to exonerate attractive defendants, and for certain crimes, to recommend more lenient punishments.

Even though pretty privilege confers real, measurable benefits to good-looking people, we’re glad that pretty privilege hasn’t led to a formal segregation of society (after Chicago repealed its ugly law, anyway). Racism gave us Jim Crow laws and apartheid. Sexism kept women disenfranchised until women’s suffrage picked up between 1902 (Australia) and 2015 (Saudi Arabia). Imagine a lookist dystopia where “No Uggos Allowed” signs are common, and the Pulchritudinous Caste reigns over the Average Joes and Plain Janes, who in turn oppress the vast Uggo Underclass!
Attractive people will sometimes highlight the drawbacks of beauty. They’ll lament about how:
Envy puts a target on their backs, and jealousy causes other people to view them as competitors; this leads to ostracism, hostility, and denial of jobs/promotions if the hiring manager feels threatened.
According to this study, attractive women have a harder time breaking into male-dominated fields (e.g. software development, engineering, finance, CEO) than average or ugly women4.
There’s a tendency to assume that attractive people reached their station in life by luck, sex appeal, or preferential treatment – and not by merit.
To an ugly person who feels relegated to playing the game of life on hard mode, these complaints seem preposterous. Sort of like listening to a rich person crying about how they have to pay so much in taxes, then drying their tears with hundred-dollar bills. That said, we’ll agree that beauty is not a panacea for all of life’s problems. We’ll discuss even more drawbacks – ones rarely discussed – in How to Accidentally Fall in Love with a Coworker.
Should You Fight Lookism?
If you run a brothel, a strip club, or a movie studio, you should probably shelve your morals when you put on your leadership hat. Failing to discriminate based on attractiveness will probably destroy your business. You can argue that a non-discriminatory policy is the right thing to do, but the crowning achievement of your self-righteousness is to create a void that a competitor will occupy when your business implodes. To make matters worse, you’re now unemployed and unemployable, subsisting on expired cat food, while possibly defending against lawsuits for breaching your fiduciary duty.
Things get a little fuzzier when your business supposedly sells one product but actually delivers another:
Does Hooters sell burgers and chicken wings, or is the “breastaurant” selling the experience of being served by sexy buxom women? In 1997, Hooters settled a lawsuit which allowed them to continue hiring only attractive women as wait staff, but forced the creation of support jobs that can be filled by men or women.
Is your CEO a visionary leader? Or mostly an actor who exudes confidence by spouting buzzwords at business analysts to distract them from the company’s falling profits? If the latter, then the executive search committee has a legitimate (if unsavory) reason to hire a photogenic
pretenderactor who’s good at lying.Abercrombie & Fitch is notorious for burning their unsold clothing so unsightly people can’t pollute the brand. Is A&F selling textiles to cover our naked bodies, or are they selling status symbols to good-looking people and wannabe hotties? In 2003, A&F settled a lawsuit which allowed them continue the practice of hiring hot staff members, as long as they hired ethnically diverse hot staff members.
For other industries where objective reality is the product and the customer experience is irrelevant (e.g. widget manufacturing, financial analysis, brain surgery), lookism reduces the pool of human talent available to you. In these disciplines, beauty bias should be expunged from your personal conduct and from your organization.
How to Fight Pretty Privilege
Let’s start by setting reasonable expectations. If we can’t eradicate the types of discrimination that are illegal and talked about openly, eradicating pretty privilege – something from the Taboo Tunnels – will be doubly difficult.
Individual Efforts to Fight Beauty Bias
Resisting discrimination is like starting a diet. It’s easy to set a calorie limit…until someone leaves a box of chocolate-drizzled donuts in the breakroom. It’s easy to swear off pretty privilege…until you make eye contact with a cute coworker and your brain starts oozing feel-good juice.
People who successfully lose weight often use “if-then” plans. If I see donuts in the breakroom → then I will retrieve a healthy snack from the stash hidden in my desk. If I get home from work before 5:30pm → then I will put on my running shoes to go for a jog before I veg out on the couch. Over time, executing “if-then” statements will result in new weight-loss habits.
To fight lookism, you can use “if-then” plans to train yourself into new mental habits:
If I notice my eyes lingering on an attractive person → then I will recite a thought-terminating cliché, such as:
Never judge a book by its cover.
All that glitters is not gold.
Beauty is skin-deep; ugly goes to the bone.
If I feel averse to hiring an overweight, tattooed person with a punchable face but who is otherwise qualified for the job → then I will review this Leadership Land post on the counterintuitive benefits of hiring someone who doesn’t look the part.
If I find myself daydreaming about a particularly alluring feature on someone → then I will re-frame that feature in unflattering terms:
A handsome face → Skull covering
Big beautiful eyes → Large eyeballs
Shiny, voluminous hair → Reflective head fur
A pleasing voice → Throat noises
A shapely body → Fleshy organ bag
The key is not to deny that someone is attractive; it’s to make their beauty as romantic as a bowel movement. This is an ancient Stoic technique for retraining your mind away from automatic associations. For example, in Meditations 6.13, Marcus Aurelius re-frames a seared steak as an animal carcass, vintage wine as moldy grape juice, and an orgasm as a seizure followed by cloudy liquid.
Organizational Efforts to Fight Beauty Bias
We spent a long time thinking and researching methods for fighting pretty privilege in organizations, but we were disappointed to find no workable solutions. Ideas that sounded good in theory fell apart in practice. The best we can offer you is some food for thought: consider societies where women are required to wear burqas in public. These garments hide women’s features from crown to toe, thus bringing both ugliness and beauty into formless parity. Lookism is much harder to practice if there’s nothing to be attracted to or repulsed by!
Burqas might eliminate pretty privilege, but they do so in a dystopian, “Harrison Bergeron” kind of way. Is eliminating lookism worth the cost of suppressing individuality and trampling on people’s freedoms? Only you can decide what’s right for your organization. Consider a moderate approach, like the military practice of issuing unisex uniforms to their soldiery, and check out this study about how COVID-19 facemasks may have reduced lookism.
Next article, we’ll go deeper into the Taboo Tunnels. Click here to read How to Accidentally Fall in Love with a Coworker!
“Conventionally attractive” in the Anglosphere, anyway. Beauty standards vary widely across cultures. Some examples that Americans might find mind-boggling:
In some African countries, obesity is such a status symbol that girls are force-fed to fatten them up.
In many Asian cultures, pale skin is beautiful. Visit an R1 university campus on a bright sunny day, and you’ll see East Asian international students walking under umbrellas – they’re trying to avoid a tan (and maybe skin cancer).
In central Asian countries, the unibrow is uni-xquisite. Tajik women use makeup to mimic a unibrow in the same way American women draw on cartoon eyebrows.
More specifically: discrimination against older people. Discrimination against the young is called “adultism,” and the concept at least a century old. But we adults rationalize our paternalism by saying we’re protecting the children, that minors don’t know any better, etc.
This is phenomenon has a name: the Pygmalion effect.
All women have a hard time entering a male-dominated field. The opposite is not true; the barriers to entry around female-dominated fields are no higher for men (irrespective of handsomeness) than they are for women.
More specific to lookism: we don’t know if attractive men have more or less trouble breaking into traditionally female-dominated fields than average or ugly men. We couldn’t find anything about it, but absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence.