Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bias against fat people, against "unattractive" people, etc.

This also shows in the classroom, work, etc.

Of course, actually being conventionally attractive will come with its own perks. People will go out of their way to help you, and to support you. Over time this could very well boost your ego to also become more confident and decisive.

> On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty premium even after the introduction of online teaching.

So the submission title’s claim that attractive students no longer receive better results when teachers can see their face isn’t true. The result was only detected for female students.

The fact that there is a discrepancy doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in the results. When you can only find a significant change after you start subdividing the group into different sub-groups it’s getting a little too close to p-hacking for my comfort. That’s not to say there isn’t a gender effect here, but the fact that males rating high on the beauty scores also got higher grades should suggest that this isn’t as simple as teachers biasing their grades based on what the students looked like.

The company went on to grow quite successfully until it was acquired 6 years later. I feel that zoom and video conferencing allows some of that "appearance" factor back in. Based on my experience though, if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.

if that mismatch increased more for women than men, the estimated “beauty premium” for women could fall even without any change in teachers’ discriminatory behavior. The paper just assumes the attractiveness stayed constant during the period, but seems to have had no data to verify this.

I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally attractive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

"We rated 307 Swedish industrial design students by facial attractiveness and after controlling for socieconomic factors found that males with attractive faces retained a statistically significant grade advantage before and during COVID remote learning whereas females with attractive faces lost their pre-pandemic grade advantage. The beauty premium is only visible in qualitative subjects, not quantitative ones. We don't quantify the extent of the beauty premium in this report."

The phd student who conducted it trawled through students' Facebook pages and took their profile photos (without consent). Then he had a jury of 74 teenagers rate the photos on a scale from 1 to 10. Then he tried to correlate beauty with grades for distance or in-class education. De-anonymizing the data was trivial so everyone could pretty much see how the jury had rated each profile photo. And research data is public.

It was a seriously weak study with questionable methodology and a too low effect-size to draw any conclusions anyway. So no reason to get alarmed if you are ugly. :)

1. This should have a 2022 tag

2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder and many of the comments here are "red pill" coded.

In the past they would stare in pure awe at my guaranteed impeccable looks.

Now they ask me damned question to calculate the speed of fluids in different pipes through the Bernoulli's principle. And ChatGPT only helps so much here ...

Also, I think there must be a pretty big difference between female and male, because even if a male student is attract, if I am a male teacher and interested in females, would I wish to prioritize on looks, if the underlying grading is instead done on e. g. testing knowledge and skills? Why would looks even factor in here? Such a system would be flawed from the get go.

This only serves as a tool for people who are trying to find a basis for their beliefs.

I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people.

Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.

I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social.

In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love.

Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.