Does being beautiful help a woman's career?

“My former boss implied that the only reason they hired me [and the other guy] was because I had smiled and she realized I looked good,”Patience (not real name), a 23-year old brand marketer says to Pulse, “and, although I wanted to be in copywriting, I ended up in client services.”

The reactions by some men to the aforementioned article showed that they were convinced that the opposite was the case for women. This means that they believed the stereotype that beautiful and good-looking ladies have it easy when it comes to their careers.

Beauty is a factor in the workplace for women ece-auto-gen

For the most part, this is true, especially for client-sourcing positions — from bank clerks to actresses to marketers. A beautiful and charismatic woman would more likely be given audience at a pitch or be chosen for a position over one that is not. This bias takes root in the mentality that “beautiful” automatically means “goodness” or “kindness” which people are more receptive to and is not necessarily a bad thing.

These days, women are taking advantage of their good looks to seize career opportunities for themselves. In a 2009 career advice article for Cosmopolitan magazine, Ivanka Trump recommends readers “emit sex appeal on the job [to] make [them more] alluring” and to“evoke sensuality by saying [they] are ‘passionate’ about a project or have ‘intimate knowledge’ of [an] industry.”

In Nigeria, however, it is almost impossible to talk about beauty without talking about light-skin. It is common for people to think that being beautiful or attractive automatically equals being light-skinned.

Light-skinned ladies are placed on a much higher pedestal than others — making men long to have them and other women yearn to be like them. This has caused an endemic of skin lightening over the years and put Nigeria in the spot of the second highest user of bleaching products with a whopping number of 99.5 million users, according to a 2002 survey by Zero Hg, Mercury Working Group.

It is also not unusual to see Nigerian women to pursue and flaunt their good-looks and/or light skin in order to get ahead in the workplace.

“Being beautiful definitely helps your career. Maybe not being beautiful alone but also, charismatic... the way you appear affects how they consider you [for] the roles you are offered. At first, they say you'd look good on the team but what they really mean is that you could calm a client down just by [them] looking at you,” Patience adds.

As much as this theory holds for many endeavours, some women do not see beauty as an important feature for them to advance in their careers. Though it can be admired in the workplace, it is common for colleagues to link beauty to incapability or incompetence, the same way it is linked to goodness and kindness. This is rampant in fields mostly dominated by men and where women need the focus to be on their work rather than their physical features.

Amarachi, a twenty-something-year-old Information Management Engineer tells Pulse: “Generally, I think being attractive or good looking helps. I feel like people are naturally drawn to this. Personally, I don’t feel like I have gotten preferential treatment in my career because of how I look but when I really think about it, I would say some things have been easier.

For example, when I visit clients, they are more receptive of me and when I go to the rig, a lot of engineers help me out with certain tasks even without [my] asking. Maybe in that sense, it has helped my career… but in every other way, probably not. My promotions are based on merits and because of the steps put in place. Looks alone can’t get you by, you have to know your craft.”

Basically, a position dependent on looks will be fleeting and most times, needs to be backed up by expertise. For such women, they are of the opinion that even if beauty plays a role in getting you in the room, it doesn't guarantee you a permanent seat at the table.

However, some see beauty entirely as a liability. As women proceed up the ladder, beauty is seen less like a superpower and more as a disadvantage and there is a pressing need to emphasise their seriousness.

Affiong, 24-year-old scriptwriter thinks that beauty can hurt a woman’s career more than it can help. “The men want to sleep with you and the woman are envious of you or intimidated by you… they hardly want to see past the beauty,” she says.

Top businesswoman, Eileen Carey, has said that she decided to quit wearing high-heels, ditch her contact lenses for glasses and go for more loose-fitting clothes as she climbed higher up the ladder. Carey, who works in Silicon Valley as the CEO of Glassbreakers, also had to dye her blonde hair brown to be taken more seriously as a business leader.

Eileen Carey had to dye her blonde hair brown to be taken more seriously as a business leader ece-auto-gen

For women like this, beauty is seen to become a liability later on when they get into managerial positions and positions of power because of the forerunning stereotypes about beauty being incompatible with capacity.

Until then, according to Patience, it does feel nice to have opportunities that don't exist especially be created for you.