The Sex Roles magazine does not engage in all sorts of nonsense, and if it undertakes to publish research, then on an interesting topic. In the last issue, journalists were puzzled by the question: why beautiful women rarely become leaders. Sociologists were attracted to the discussion, who stated that this was due to the effect of the “femme fatale”.
»It often happens that very beautiful women are perceived by both men and other representatives of the fair sex as a kind of threat to their life and peace. This is important in cases where we have to assess how much we are willing to trust them and believe in what they say, says Lee Sheppard of the University of Washington at Pullman.
In 2011 and 2013, two groups of British scientists found that people with good looks, on average, have higher IQs and are more likely to get more promising jobs than people with mediocre physical characteristics.
At the same time, as noted by Sheppard and her colleague Stephanie Johnson of the University of Colordo in Boulder (USA), these discoveries contradicted the data that most senior executives cannot boast of dazzling beauty.
And then another story surfaced in the news, how the Iowa state court acquitted a dentist who fired an assistant because "she was too beautiful, greatly distracted him from work and threatened the well-being of his family."
Then the scientists decided to conduct a social experiment: they came up with 30 fictional stories about the emergence of various problems or successes in the work of corporations, which were headed by attractive and nondescript men and women. These stories had about the same content, with the exception of the scope of the company, the gender of its leader and his photograph.
All of these stories had to be read by two hundred volunteers recruited by Sheppard and Johnson on the network. According to scientists, they had to assess the "credibility" of the statements of one or another boss and name the one of them whom they would trust more.
So, the opinions of the volunteers about beautiful people almost always coincided; they trusted attractive people much less than ugly women and men with any appearance, and the strength of this distrust did not depend in any way on the scope of work of the fictional company or the reasons for its problems.
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For example, the respondents, regardless of their own gender, were equally unfriendly towards attractive women who ran both a fictional IT company and a PR firm or hospital, traditionally considered “female” vocations.
This "sexual gap", according to scientists, is associated with a phenomenon that they called the "femme fatale" effect. It is rooted in human evolution and lies in the fact that both men and women subconsciously consider beautiful women to be dangerous to their own career and family peace. The former see them as a threat to family stability, while the latter see them as a potential competitor.
OLGA ANTONOVA