יופי של הערכות: האם סטודנטיות מושפעות יותר מסטודנטים מהופעתו החיצונית של המרצה?

The effects of faculty members' external appearance on teaching ratings in academic institutions have rarely been studied. The purpose of this study is to examine this effect and to explore the sex differences of both raters and ratees. The physical attractiveness of 55 lecturers was rated by their students and then correlated with their teaching ratings, which had been collected in the same course the previous semester. The more attractive male lecturers received higher ratings from female students only. The more attractive female lecturers did not receive better ratings from either male or female students. The main conclusion of the study states that men in academia benefit from a "beauty premium" while women do not. This "discrimination" stems from the contradiction between two types of images: role images and gender images. Since beautiful people are perceived as more characteristic of their gender (i.e., a beautiful woman is perceived as more feminine and a handsome man as more masculine), the "beauty effect" benefits beautiful people when their role image corresponds to their gender image. However, when there is a contradiction between role image and gender image, as in the case of female lecturers, the beautiful person does not merit from the "beauty premium".