A story from the New Zealand Herald today reports that good-looking women face discrimination when it comes to applying for 'masculine' jobs, such as prison guards and construction supervisors.
Good-looking women did, however, have an advantage over their less attractive female counterparts in jobs deemed feminine.
Men, on the other hand, face no such beauty-barrier: good-looking men always have an advantage over less good-looking men seeking work, regardless of whether the job they are after is a seen as masculine or feminine.
The research carried out by the University of Colorado Denver Business School revealed that although good looking women were unlikely to obtain 'masculine jobs', 'when they do get hired, beautiful people tend to get higher salaries,better performance evaluations, are more likely to gain admission to university, get better voter ratings when running for public office and more favourable judgments in trials'.
So what happened to the idea of getting a job because you were good at it?