Study Shows Attractive Female Students Got Worse Grades After Their Classes Were Moved Online

There has always a been a running joke that a beautiful woman can get away with murder if she really wanted to. While this might be an exaggerated stereotype, we've all witnessed the special power that gorgeous women have on people around them. A recent study published in Economic Letters found that there very well may be some advantages to being attractive in the classroom.

Study Shows Attractive Female Students Got Worse Grades after Their Classes Were Moved Online

A graduate student at Lund University named Adrian Mehic decided to research the effect that attractiveness has on someone's grades while studying at a university. He gathered data from five different groups of engineering students, 307 in total, from a Swedish university. Two of the groups contained students who attended some of their classes exclusively online during the coronavirus lockdowns.

“I’m interested in discrimination generally,” Mehic said. “In economics research, lots of attention is given to discrimination based on gender and/or race. While these are important issues, there has not been much research on beauty-based discrimination in the educational setting, so the paper fills a gap there.”

“Also, the pandemic made discrimination based on appearance much more difficult, since teachers could not readily see students’ faces. Whereas discrimination on for instance gender is possible in the online setting also, as long as you have the names of students.”

Mehic had an independent sample of 74 people rate how good looking the students' faces were. All the students who were studying remotely were encouraged to turn on their video cameras during remote classes but it wasn't mandatory. Mehic found a so-called beauty premium amongst female students in non-quantitative courses, such as economics or business. This means the attractive female students got worse grades when they shifted to remote learning, but this wasn't the case with good-looking men. The attractive male students saw their grades remain essentially the same after they switched to online classes.

Mehic claims there is still a beauty premium "both for males and for females when teaching is on-site," but this changed when the instruction was done online. "This, at least to me, suggests that the beauty premium for males is due to some productive attribute (for instance, them having higher self-confidence) rather than discrimination, whereas it is due to discrimination for women," he says. “I was surprised by the fact that male students continued to perform better when teaching was online."

However, the beauty premium wasn't witnessed in quantitative courses, such as math and physics. But the non-quantitative courses made it clear that as soon as a beautiful woman switched to remote learning and didn't show her face to the instructor, her grades were more likely to get worse. Maybe hot girl privilege does exist after all.