The following text (and the title above) is courtesy of Professor Frances Woolley, Department of Economics (cross-appointed to School of Public Policy and Administration), Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada: Dr. Wooley received her PhD (Economics) in 1990 from the London School of Economics:
There are some research questions you have to answer simply because the data is there: the salaries of Ontario university professors are published on the public sector salary disclosure website, research output is listed on Econlit, university websites and calendars list a person’s rank – there are even databases that list every doctoral thesis published, so we can find out when a person received his or her doctorate, and thus estimate their age. But most tempting of all, on ratemyprofessors.com, students rank their professors for clarity, helpfulness, easiness and “appearance (just for fun): __Hot __Not.” If a professor receives more hots than nots, a chili pepper appears beside his or her name. In a recent working paper, Marcel Voia, Anindya Sen, and I use this information to estimate the effect of hotness on the pay and productivity of economics professors in Ontario.
There’s lots of evidence that, in general, good looking people earn higher salaries. But why would hotness pay in academia? A professor’s salary is largely determined by what he or she teaches (Engineering pays better than English), rank (full professors earn more than associates or assistants), where he or she teaches (University of Toronto pays better than Trent), and his or her research productivity. Yes, being good looking might make it easier to get an academic job in the first place. But surely, once a person has an academic job, intellectual ability – the ability to do original research – matters more than looks? Indeed we found that female professors rated as “hot” by their students earn no more – and might even earn less – than the “not.” We included controls for age and a host of other factors, so our results are not due to the fact that that younger women are simultaneously more junior and more likely to be rated hot.
Other research has found that women who are more demanding in negotiations are rated as less attractive. Perhaps the personality traits that prompt a woman to negotiate a higher salary just aren’t seen as sexy in the classroom. For men, however, we found a startlingly high pay-off to hotness. True, not many male professors are rated as hot, but those that are earn much more. Controlling for age, rank, university, and research productivity, hot male economics professors are almost 20 per cent more likely to be earning more than $100,000 a year. Conditional upon earning more than $100,000 a year, being hot increases a male professor’s predicted salary by more than $3,000. We do not know exactly why hot male professors earn more. One possibility is hot men are those who are more assertive, and this leads to successful salary negotiations. Another possible explanation comes from the comments students write on ratemyprofessors.com. “I absolutely loved Professor ____. He’s one of the busiest people in the Economics department and yet he never sees it as an inconvenience to do what he can to help,” or he’s a “a semi-retired superman.”
A key source of variation in academic salaries is the ability to obtain an outside offer. Hiring a senior academic, however, is a bit like buying a used car – one that is on the market is much more likely to be a lemon. Someone who is charismatic, likeable and well-organized – the traits that our hot professors seem to possess – may be more likely to convince a hiring committee that he’s not a lemon. An outside offers story would be an alternative explanation of why we do not see a hotness premium for women – women are more likely to be in situations where they are unable to move because of family or other commitments.
When we estimated the returns to hotness, we controlled for research productivity – number of publications, citations, and holding a Social Sciences and Humanities Council research grant. Yet there might be further indirect effects of hotness if, for example, people who are fit and healthy are more likely to be hot and also are more productive researchers. We explored this possibility, but didn’t find much – the relationships between hotness and research productivity were generally positive, but almost always statistically insignificant. Where there is a strong relationship is (not surprisingly) between students’ evaluations of a professor’s hotness and their evaluations of his or her teaching. Hot male professors received significantly higher scores for clarity (0.76 on a 1 to 5 scale) and helpfulness (0.68 on a 1 to 5 scale) than their not-hot counterparts. There was very little difference, however, between the hot and the not in terms of students’ ratings of the professor’s ‘easiness’. But the pattern for women was quite different. Hot female professors had somewhat higher clarity scores, but the difference wasn’t statistically significant. Where hot female professors received significantly higher evaluations was in terms of helpfulness (1.0 higher on a 1 to 5 scale) and “easiness” (0.43 on the same 1 to 5 scale – how I have struggled and failed to avoid the inevitable innuendos).
As a feminist, I find the results in one sense profoundly depressing. Men can have it all – be attractive and also well-paid. Women have a choice – you can go for it, be tough, negotiate a high salary, have high expectations of your students. But don’t expect to see a chili pepper beside your name any time soon.
Editor’s note: Alumna Sarah Battersby came up with a ratemyprofessors.com assessment of the attractiveness of 10 top ranked U.S. Geography programs: “I have two calculations per department – percent of all rated faculty with chili peppers and percent of all faculty total (including those with no ratings on ratemyprofessors.com). In terms of hotness, Clark Univ. is the leading university (45% of all “rated” faculty are hot; 29% of total faculty), followed by the Univ. of Oregon (38% of rated faculty); UCLA (36%); the Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia (31%); the Univ. of Colorado, Boulder (30%); Boston Univ. (20%); UCSB (18%); Penn State (11%); the Univ. of Maryland (9%); and the Univ. of Wisconsin (0). Methodology: 1) only includes individuals listed as faculty on the department web site; 2) ratings courtesy of ratemyprofessors.com; 3) all ratings included (so a professor may have only had 1 rating with a chili pepper); and 4) the search was limited to professors listed under Geography for their current department on ratemyprofessors.com – so if the professor taught a cross-listed course or if a professor was new to the department and not yet blessed with a chili pepper in the new department, there may have been undercounts…Informally, I believe there may be a trend of graduate students being more hot than the professors, but I have not done the analysis on this.”
