Source please.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16555779
"These findings demonstrate that female facial appearance holds detectable cues to reproductive health that are considered attractive by other people."
Found via http://asutriplehelix.org/node/99 which also cites some other related papers
EDIT: I really, really enjoy finding cases where something I assumed to be true is questioned on the grounds of scientific correctness. It is always a wonderful opportunity to bring my thinking closer to reality, no matter if my assumptions are true or false.
The real surprise should be that female attractiveness doesn't have a significant impact. My initial guess would be that investors, unfortunately, are so dismissive of female pitches that attractiveness can't even help.
If she's ugly: "Why would you want to fund an ugly girl? Let's get some hotties in here."
If she's attractive: "She's too hot. How could she possibly be a serious hacker / business leader? No one will take her seriously if she looks like that."
Maybe this is too cynical? (I sort of hope so.)
There are a number of well-known paradoxes surrounding female beauty. One is that an attractive female defendant in a criminal trial is much more likely to be convicted than a plain Jane, all other factors the same.
(See Harold Sigall and Nancy Ostrove, Beautiful but Dangerous: Effects of Offender Attractiveness and Nature of the Crime on Juridic Judgment)
This isn't at all surprising. That the expectation for women is to look good but not too good, professional but not too professional, etc. is something I've encountered for at least a decade.
Attractive men still have an advantage over unattractive men in terms of persuasion and intimidation.
So either we are seeing a genuine, global, cross-society level bias against women (possible), or we are seeing male investors wanting to invest in people they think are like themselves (attractive, successful men) or we are seeing a mislabelling of attractive (George Clooney is intelligent, articulate, methodical and good looking. Matt LeBlanc is just good looking (!)
So if they did what I suspect, got a bunch of male students to rate attractiveness of female entreprenuers and females to rate males, then what I guess is the boys picked the ones with big breasts and did not care if she was intelligent, the girls were more likely to pick "life partner", which includes good looking but also "able to provide".
Weirdly it might be useful to control females choosing "attractive" with their menstrual cycle.
WOw - complicated world I make up at times
EDIT: What's with the downvotes? There seems to be some selection bias built in to the sample. If not, please explain.
And if that means more investors are men who consider themselves decent looking, that means more invested ideas are from men who are above average too.
Another thing not taken into account is differences between the "men delivering the pitch" and "women delivering the pitch". Are the people delivering the pitch equally experienced at presenting? Gender is not the only change when you swap presenters.
In their first experiment, the researchers recruited 60 actual investors from the business world as volunteers. They asked each to watch videos of people making pitches for a project asking for backing (from actual entrepreneurial contests held across the country). Afterwards the investors were asked to rate how persuasive they felt the people doing the pitch were, and also how attractive they found them. The research team reports that they found that the investors were more likely to choose the male pitchers over those who were female, regardless of whether the content of the pitch was nearly identical. They also found that the more attractive the person giving the pitch, the more persuasive they were found to be—but only for those that were male. The investors didn't seem to care how good-looking the women were, they rated them as less persuasive than their male counterparts regardless.
http://phys.org/news/2014-03-investors-good-looking-male-ent...
THere seems to be a heap of different issues tied up together here, and this does not seem to be an elegant way of seperating out biases from anyone. I am happy to be wrong but I am not getting good vibes...
Controlling this might not necessarily be desirable. One of the problem with randomized studies is that it's difficult to show they generalize well. Given investing does not take place in a randomized environment, that investors were representative of real investors is far more important than they be controlled for.
We tend to infer intelligence to attractive people. "They are so attractive, I know they must be smart too" (subconsciously, of course). So what might that say?
It's not. All the study shows is that a bias is present, and that the bias identified in the controlled test is somewhat similar to the skewed results in "pitch competitions."
There's nothing in the paper showing the magnitude of effect this bias has on real-world investment decisions. The evidence you need is a prediction that not only will eliminating this bias improve returns, but that the improved returns are worth any costs associated with eliminating the bias.
The following is completely speculative - I know - but possibly relevant. Bear with me.
I have noticed a difference among investors. There are the engineering/slightly Aspberger's types who tend to be prior founders who exited well. And then there are the HBS hail-fellow-well-met sports-loving never-ran-a-company-but-i-know-im-a-genius types. Yes, huge generalization - but those are the two bins I place them in. My observation in my experience is that the first type seems to be less influenced by attractiveness and appearances than the latter, and make better bets. I mean - take PG or AH. Need I say more? Now, that's not to say the aspy-types are free of biases - not at all - just that they are less likely to be swayed by attractiveness.
In any case, I wonder if other people have observed this effect or whether it's just me.
They recruited 60 experienced and affluent backers to view video recordings of 90 randomly-selected verbal business pitches made by entrepreneurs from various sectors at three entrepreneurial contests in the US.
Investors were asked to rate the looks of the entrepreneurs and comment on the pitch.
Researchers found that men who were deemed good looking were 36 per cent more likely to be successful than those viewed as unattractive. However there was no difference for women.
In a separate study they asked investors to listen to the same pitches delivered by a man or a woman.
“We found that male-narrated pitches were rated as more persuasive, logical and fact-based that were the same pitches narrated by a female voice,” the authors concluded. . .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10688645/Goo...
Edit: ah, the same pitches were read. Nevermind.
Theoretically, you'd want some way to have the pitches read with precisely the same cadences and intonations, but have the ability to just swap out a female voice for a male voice. One could imagine a computer program which "female-izes" a man's reading, though I doubt anything like this exists in a form which produces a perfectly realistic sounding female voice.
I'd be interested in effect size in particular. The abstract only says "profound".
Male/High 0.39
Male/Low 0.29 n=70, p=0.042
Female/High 0.21
Female/Low 0.18 n=20, difference not significant
Male/High 5.21
Male/Low 4.59 p=0.024
Female/High 4.14
Female/Low 4.35 difference not significant
Each participant rated 1 pitch, n=520In 'Blink' Malcolm Gladwell describes how orchestras hold blind auditions, with the performers behind screens, to avoid this kind of bias.
Perhaps VC pitches should follow suit.
Question is how to eliminate unwanted bias while keeping the relevant information. With an orchestra audition, it's easy to isolate and evaluate the relevant skill: ability to play the specific instrument.
http://www.nature.com/news/musicians-appearances-matter-more... http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2011/06/06/can-being-t... http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/08/labour-m...
Not to mention all the jobs where good looks is an explicit requirement such as in modelling, acting or implicit like for waitresses or cashiers in fancy clothing shops. It's a fascinating subject and it is very impressive that we seem to be very close to quantify exactly how important beauty is. Even if it is bad news for ugly people it is better if the facts are out there so something can be done about the problem.
Not much of a surprise, same goes for picking presidents and other political leaders, even CEOs. Charisma has a lot to do with leadership and persuasiveness.
That said, it always surprised me how much of our community seems to at times take pride in the disheveled, socially awkward appearance...as if it's a badge of honor or something. To me, that's just as bad as the dumb jock persona. Why not be well-rounded? Why not take as much pride in our health and appearance as we do in our intellect?
Since the success of the venture depends upon a lot of sales and marketing of an idea both internally and externally... why is this a surprise?
Investors are worried about the success of the venture and their ROI. They understand that attractiveness can impact it.