Thaindian News

London, April 19 (IANS) Female employers are less likely to recruit good looking women out of jealously, or because they fear competing with the newcomers, according to a study.

A good looking woman - and not an attractive man - is more likely to make the female employers jealous at the workplace, and this helps to explain the double standards, the study authors said.

The researchers found that if the recruiter was a woman, job applications with an attractive picture received roughly a quarter of the response than the one with a plain picture or no picture at all.

The reason is that many human resource women are young and in their 20s and subconsciously they do not like extra competition, researchers believe, the Telegraph reported.

Bradley Ruffle of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, who conducted the research with Ze’ev Shtudiner, sent more than 5,000 job resumes to over 2,500 advertised job openings.

In each pair, one CV was without a picture while the other almost identical CV contained a picture of either an attractive looking man or woman or a plain-looking man or woman.

They found that attractive women were called for interview for a position less often than plain-looking women or women who had no picture on their resume.

Women who put no picture on their CV were 22 percent more likely to receive a response than women with a plain picture and 30 percent more likely than women with an attractive picture.

They also noted that 96 percent of the company recruiters turned out to be women, typically in their 20s and single.

These findings are to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s 2011 annual conference in the UK.