Desperate economic times tend to call for desperate measures. But can increasing your height or covering up your wrinkles actually help secure a new job or boost your salary?
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Last Updated: May 30, 2011
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Companies certainly make that claim. An online retailer, WalkTallShoes.com, says about 90 per cent of chief executives are of above average height, and the business has plenty of "height-increasing shoes" for aspiring executives who want to be elevated by up to 2.75 inches (7cm).
During the recent recession, one spa in the US started offering free Botox injections to the unemployed in a bid to help them look younger and find work. It may sound like an extreme stunt, but one survey during the downturn found that 80 per cent of plastic surgeons in the US said the reason patients were going under the knife was to gain an edge in the workplace.
The question remains, however, whether any of these tactics really help in this competitive job market.
It turns out that increasing numbers of economic as well as social and behavioural science researchers are trying to determine what makes a difference when it comes to someone's job prospects and salary potential. In some cases, experts have even tried to quantify exactly how much more pay certain characteristics may yield.
Let's start with those shoes. The Journal of Applied Psychology published research from four large-scale studies in the US and UK in which thousands of individuals were observed from childhood to adulthood, with researchers looking at details of their work and personal lives.
The research homed in on height as a key difference among the people being studied. After controlling for factors such as gender, weight and age, researchers from the University of Florida and the University of North Carolina calculated a monetary value for each extra inch of height.
The magic number: US$789 (Dh2,897) per inch per year. In other words, they argue, a colleague who is 7 inches taller than you can expect to earn about $5,520 more per year.
Now for the fine print. Being taller simply is not enough to garner a higher salary. After all, there are many tall people who aren't any good at their jobs. But what those extra inches may provide, researchers say, is a boost in confidence that helps people to be more successful.
Other research has found that what you wear also makes a tangible difference when it comes to money matters.
A recent study slated to be published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior has found that outward displays of luxury through designer labels on clothes elicit greater preferential treatment.
Participants in one experiment viewed one of two videos of a man being interviewed for a job, where the only difference was whether he was wearing a shirt with a designer logo or not. Those who saw the version where his shirt had the logo rated him more suitable for the position - and even recommended that he earn a salary that was 9 per cent higher than what they recommended when his shirt had no logo.
As superficial as these studies make us all seem, the indications from the research only get worse.
Not only do the underdressed and vertically challenged have to worry about being shortchanged, but so do the ugly or, rather, those who look less "competent."
Welcome to "A Corporate Beauty Contest". That is the name of a paper written last year by three professors at Duke University for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, non-profit research organisation in the US.
This contest of sortswas based on some 2,000 participants flipping through stacks of photos. The results of one experiment found that people rated chief executives as appearing more competent, though less likable, than non-chief executives.
Another experiment found that the chief executives of big businesses looked more competent - and likable - than those from smaller rival companies.
But the truly headline-grabbing discovery, which Duke made clear in the multiple e-mails it has sent to the media, was that "CEOs rated competent just by their appearance tended to have higher income".
How much higher? An average total compensation of 7.5 per cent more than top executives who scored less on the competence (i.e. good looks) scale.
Taken at face value, the results of these studies seem to bolster those company claims that improving our height and faces, for that matter, will help us walk the road to success.
But here's another idea: we could take all that time spent worrying about what "science says" - and all that money that would otherwise go to shoe lifts and face-lifts - and focus on doing a better job at work and, perhaps, purchasing some skills training.
Then, again, which headline-seeking researcher is really going to want to work on those kinds of studies?
