‘Attractive women 16% more likely to secure startup funding’ | Hacker News Reader

‘Attractive women 16% more likely to secure startup funding’

ft.com

108 pointsbelter91 comments

In truth 16% is much lower than I would have expected, expected it upwards of 50%.

I once had a debate with a friend about whether it was ethical to hire someone based on looks, because looks were something mostly inherent to the person and not earned (how well you take care of it and fitness withstanding), and he argued that it was just as ethical or even more so than hiring for intelligence which is just as inherent, but offers similar types of advantages. I've been more open minded about it since, more of the opinion of "use the pretty person to be a front/face" almost along the lines of "put the right person in the right position".

You hire the person that's going to be best for the job.

Depends on the job.

Engineer, recruiter, and linebacker all have different needed characteristics, sometimes acquired and sometimes intrinsic.

That's the only consistent definition of "fair"

There are a lot of winners through nepotism in the world.

Your ability to craft an idea in correct logic of a language does not mean the logic is meaningful to reality.

Nepotism means hiring friends or family. The advantage there is that you start out with a greater level of trust, depending on how long you've known the person. This must be weighed against the disadvantage that there are likely more skilled individuals to be found. When dealing with delicate matters (i.e. when small mistakes cause big problems), reliability becomes more important.

There’s a lot of examples out there where hiring family was a complete flop. Show data trust in family is rational and not just low effort.

I think you’re making up a narrative that sounds roughly technical, roughly contemporary wisdom but is 100% primate throwing BS.

Hiring family is questionable.

Hiring former work associates ("work friends") is more solid. Because that relationship is based in a relevant environment.

What if the family member is looking for their first job and is well trained?

Most people trust their families more than their work acquaintances. Still, the family member must have more than trust, to do a good job in a skilled profession.

Proof? I'm not going to spend the effort to cite data here, since we have no prior relationship.

Pretty big assumption that intelligence is as inherent as beauty.

There are a lot of environmental factors that contribute to intelligence, not to mention a lot of neuro issues.

There is no pill for beauty but there are several for ADHD.

There are pills for beauty. Look at Kylie Jenner, you think that's all natural? In fact I'd say you have less control over intelligence then you do over beauty.

Growing up with a poor diet and lack of nutrients will make your skin look bad, you won’t grow as tall, and you’ll be overall less attractive. Many environmental factors directly contribute to one’s’ perceived attractiveness.

A lot of beauty is just keeping healthy and dressing well. Arguably the same as intelligence. A lot you can control, a bit is luck.

A lot of intelligence is studying hard, but you can't control whether or not you actually have the desire to pursue such a vector.

The same for looks. You can eat healthy and look after yourself, but not control if you want to.

Beauty has just as many caveats as intelligence.

“You’re not ugly, just poor.” Is a saying for a reason. There’s plastic surgery, ozempic, having the time/drive to work out consistently, dressing well, eating well, etc etc.

People can improve their beauty score by 2-3 points if they have the drive and/or money.

Intelligence is more inherent than beauty. Its 85% heritable by adulthood.

> There is no pill for beauty

There are in fact many. Grooming, diet, exercise, apparel, cosmetics, supplements, dentistry, surgery, non-surgical treatments.

A wise person once said, "there are no ugly people, only poor people."

I suppose the answer will be in the data. If attractive founders create more money for VCs then it's 'correct' they be given more funding.

And what if it were race/ethnicity?

I think it’d be unwise for VCs to discriminate on protected characteristics. Even if the investments worked the legal/political consequences wouldn’t be worth it.

However, the entire purpose of early stage VCs is to allocate capital by discriminating between founders. To that extent discriminating on non protected characteristics like education, experience and presentation skills are fair game.

I’m assuming attractiveness is a non protected characteristic but we’d need to be careful to define it in a way that doesn’t accidentally proxy for protected characteristics.

I shocked.

Next I'm going to hear that taller men are more likely to be promoted to management.

It's almost like we're a bunch of apes, with passable table manners

It’s amazing how many mysteries evaporate when one accepts this rather obvious premise.

Standing tall pays off, study finds

https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/standing

"When it comes to height, every inch counts--in fact, in the workplace, each inch above average may be worth $789 more per year, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology."

Dating too: https://researchblog.duke.edu/2014/02/11/advice-in-the-love-...

“In fact, for a 5’ 9” man to be equally attractive to a 5’ 10” man, he would have to make $40,000 more in salary per year.”

"No amount of money could make up for a woman’s BMI; men didn’t care about a woman’s salary or her graduate degree."

Checks out.

being tall and/or attractive is a cheat code for life.

as google bard told me recently, life is simply not fair.

See 30 Rock "Handsome Bubble"

Oh, also, ugly men have a tougher time raising venture capital:

https://www.geekwire.com/2014/study-ugly-men-tougher-time-ra...

One of you is the least attractive person I've ever seen, and I'm not gonna say who.

Apart from good health attractiveness is the probability the biggest privilege that you can be born with. It’s normal, attractive people will always have an advantage because it’s in our nature to wanting to be around attractive people for obvious evolutionary reasons. All these studies and articles which basically confirm that humans are after all just another type of animal are getting a bit boring. Yes we know, we have some pretty basic animalistic instincts, because we are just another creature roaming this planet. Accept it and get on with life. Everyone can make themselves more attractive through healthy eating, physical exercise, good hygiene and self care and looking at the positives in life and have an aura of positivity and smiles.

I'm actually surprised it's that low.

We humans are irrational, and we tend to associate attractiveness with competency, trustworthiness, and goodness in general.

Which is utterly and completely divorced from reality.

I guess it's because we want to further our genes and we're wired to go for attractive mates because we'll have attractive offspring which can further those genes more easily. Geez, I wonder if that's evolutionary or learned...

And I'm speculating, but I guess our brains give attractive people a better starting score because we... want to mate with them? Or we want introduce them to our sibling so they can mate?

Maybe it’s an instinct to give resources to attractive people to increase the fitness of the group.

Or maybe investors know that attractive people have an advantage in business (for irrational reasons), so it’s rational for investors to value attractiveness.

> Which is utterly and completely divorced from reality.

Do you have a citation for this statement? I would be very careful about saying things like this. You might be significantly more incorrect than you presume.

Yeah I agree, it doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that those things aren't correlated. In fact, if nothing else and based on no other factor, the existence of this bias is itself telling us that attractive women are probably more likely to have more experience, since they likely will have received additional opportunities which would be self-reinforcing and result in exactly such a correlation.

And all that totally ignores the fact that we're assuming the genes behind attractiveness (which can include indications of health, athleticism, and developmental symmetry) have zero effect on mental factors. That assumption would really require supporting evidence IMO.

> it doesn't seem immediately obvious to me that those things aren't correlated.

Wait, what? My assertion is that physical attractiveness is not correlated with competence, trustworthiness, and being a good person. You see evidence that there is such a correlation?

My entire experience with people gives no hint of any such thing. The beautiful people I've known have not been more likely to have any of those qualities than the ugly people I've known.

I'd be very interested in any evidence of such a correlation. It would completely rock my world.

> the existence of this bias is itself telling us that attractive women are probably more likely to have more experience

This is a completely different thing, though.

> That assumption would really require supporting evidence IMO.

That's completely backward. If you're asserting a correlation, it's on you to provide supporting evidence for it. You are making a positive claim. All I'm saying is that I see no evidence in support of that claim.

Moneyball. Athletes that don't "look the part" are cheaper.

As naked monkeys in the wild, perhaps. However in our modern world a visit to the esthetician and an appointment with a makeup artist before the interview will make you appear healthier than the most nourished monkey in the jungle.

Now you could argue that having the awareness to do this before an interview is a display of intelligence, however I would say that this is indicative of a type intelligence different to the one needed to be, say, a good engineer.

Are you asserting that there's a correlation between physical attractiveness and how trustworthy, competent, and good people are?

If so, then I think it would be you that needs to provide evidence for it, if for no other reason that on casual inspection anyway, there is no hint that is the case.

It’s divorced from some “higher” reality maybe, but the CEO will be operating in a human reality where their attractiveness will continue to pay off. Getting more funding, hiring talent, and eventually trying to IPO will all be influenced by having an attractive confident CEO.

There's a cycle here. Being attractive is a large competitive advantage which leads to people being attracted to attractive people.

It's a bummer that the benefit of being hot is this big but not at all surprising.

> "We’ve not seen the paper yet so will have to go by the press office’s description, which outlines an experiment where 111 male early-stage investors are shown video of the same start-up business idea presented by a conventionally hot actresses and one who is more plain."

so these were experiments showing video of hot vs. plain ladies to a panel of men

Yeah unclear if one hot lady and one plain lady or many of each.

good point. also, if there was only one of each then there might have been a difference between them other than how they looked like.

Attractive women are more likely to secure funding in other professions too, such as waitressing and food delivery.

the well know pay gender gap.

I feel so terrible saying this, but there are tons really good female programmers who aren’t attractive.

I think it’s more in sales/fundraising positions where looks matter more.

Looks matter everywhere. The halo effect is very real.

Yep. There's an informal name for people on a consulting or consulting team for this purpose: "talent". Interestingly, in women C-suite heavy environments, there is an occasional niche of bringing male talent on a team.

The general rule: Attractiveness correlates positively with income per unit effort. Attractive people get other people to do the hard work for them.

The corollary is that unattractive people must work harder, prove themselves more, and are forgiven less than attractive people. People tend to hold unconscious biases against unattractive people as more likely to be selfish, unkind, unworthy, and criminal.

PS: Respect to attractive people from well-to-do families who work their behinds off to not coast on stereotypical advantages.

> Respect to attractive people from well-to-do families who work their behinds off to not coast on stereotypical advantages.

Hey, thanks! Sometimes I feel like we don't get the recognition we deserve (winky-facy emoji) (hot and sweating emoji).

We have known since time immemorial that attractive people, men and women, have a slight leg up in life.

How is this news, and how is this surprising?

Not only more attractive people (both men and women) but taller, I believe thinner, are also automatically get a leg up. Beyond just physical appearance, I'm sure (as Elizabeth Holmes may have leveraged) voice tone, gaze, and other non-genetic or alterable genetic traits also play a factor.

But we all have to play the hand we are dealt.

Also, lets not forget that those VCs who are doing the investing are also likely in the more attractive side of the equation.

For people who did not win the genetic lottery, it probably feels like the game is fixed against them in every direction.

I believe this may have been a benefit in virtual settings where height, and many other physical attributes are not as easily judged.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4342156/

A leg up? Interesting choice of words

Humans regardless of gender favour what they perceive as “beautiful”. Cant change human nature.

Male physical attractiveness is qualitatively different from female, because female attractiveness is pretty much a set of fertility proxies[1] and little else, whereas male attractiveness is much more dependent on signaling provisioning ability and overall social status.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29178517/

Are you implying that for founders, female attractiveness is a poor signal for funding a startup, but male attractiveness is a strong signal?

The answer to this lives at the bottom of a rabbit hole because there's too many confounding factors. Layer 1 for women's attractiveness is fertility signals but layer 2 is the means to acquire them -- eating well, managing weight (I don't mean just being skinny, gaining/losing weight a lot makes you lose fat in desirable areas which is why filler is so popular), exercise, skincare, makeup and the free time to get skilled at it, flattering clothes, plastic surgery, etc.. And all this stuff is a signal of overall social status.

The feminine form is a work of art the male body is for doing work.

As someone who's gay and obviously appreciates the male form, your statement is not true at all.

Actually, you can factor most bias out of decisions by structuring the process carefully. There is no excuse not to do so.

How would you do that? Are you not going to interact with the entrepreneurs and see their faces?

Elite orchestral musicians are hired "blind." Moneyball is about hiring athletes that "don't look the part."

There is a case to be made for a fund that would not let, for example, Adam Neumann snow them.

If the attractive founder will be selling, hiring employees or raising future capital, it’s probably not irrational to like them more. 15% doesn’t seem enough to paper over a truly bad business idea like Neumann’s latest.

I am not sure why the downvotes. My comment doesn't imply that we cant or shouldnt have mechanisms to factor out bias or other human nature traits. I think it is precisely because it’s in our nature that we should actively seek a fair process. Nature wont change but the process can.

A lot of people are looking at it from the perspective of bias but another component is that attractive people get more opportunities to socialize and have more confidence and these things give them an advantage.

I really wish it was easy to find people like that who will be your CEO and face of the company. I don't even bother with implementing my ideas because of this. A good idea is a small portion of what you need to succeed.

For quite a while now, musicians audition behind a screen and remove their shoes so judges can't infer their gender from footfalls.

A stark reminder of how easily discrimination creeps in is in the number of male music directors/conductors vs orchestra members. Obv conductors are hired "the old fashioned way."

https://archive.is/7BKxF

> 111 male early-stage investors are shown video of the same start-up business idea presented by a conventionally hot actresses and one who is more plain

Is this one hot person to represent them all? Seems like not the world’s best experimental if so

Also maybe attractive (/charismatic?) men do better too.

I have learned that it makes sense to hire less good looking people, other things being roughly equal. Very attractive people - both men and women - are a distraction to a workforce of young, single people, and lots of flirting in the office can get toxic very quickly. Furthermore, if two people appear to be equally qualified for a job, you can bet your bottom dollar that the uglier one had to work harder to get there. To my knowlege, there is no law against discriminating on an attractiveness basis, as long as both men and women are treated equally.

Probably it is a sound strategy. People who are better--for whatever reason--to secure funding, are probably also better in talking to partners, suppliers, media and the like.

> "the halo error (a cognitive bias whereby our perception of a person is shaped by our opinions of other traits) as applied to risk tolerance, which it proven to be vulnerable to stress and concupiscence."

so i know a lot of words but i guess i didn't know enough words at the intersection of christianity and horniness

> "concupiscence"

> "Involuntary sexual arousal is explored in the Confessions of Augustine, wherein he used the term "concupiscence" to refer to sinful lust."

People are less likely to use a condom on if they are about to have sex with an attractive person.

Turns out they are also more likely to throw money at a project.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-...

"Tall men" "Wealthy men" "Handsome mean" "Men with a deep voice" why make it about purely about women rather than the overarching topic/problem? Literally everyone is judged based on appearance.

The Elizabeth Holmes maneuver

> So maybe the solution is for VC companies is to hire fewer jerks?

Why is this got to be the take?

Maybe the more effective strategy is for female lead startups to hire more attractive women to promote their business getting funding.

16% seems... suspiciously low. I would have estimated this effect to be much larger.

Shout out to all the short men looking for funding. We feel your pain.

This paper lacks a lot of context if they didn't compare the results for an attractive vs unattractive male founder.

Most advice for life, dating, professional etc, implicitly starts with:

- Be attractive

- Don't be unattractive

"physical attractiveness does not matter among female entrepreneurs"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321202111

I wonder which study will turn out to be correct.

In other news VCs don't get laid enough.

i smell a horrible movie plot. is eddie murphy available?

If she flirts I’ll up it to 50%? Any takers?

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