BNET’s Penelope Trunk has argued before that it is a good idea to get plastic surgery to advance your career. While the post might have caused plenty of outrage, the underlying principle seems solid enough. People like good-looking people and on average they tend to do better professionally. Not good looking? Call your surgeon.

But is the idea that being attractive is always a boon for your career really true? Research has shown that slender women earn more, as do taller men. But now a pair of new studies reveals that the picture is actually more complicated.

The first, published in , looked at whether the bias for good-looking job candidates holds true regardless of the gender of the person evaluating the applicant. The researchers found that when men and women were shown pictures or recorded interviews of candidates with equal qualifications but varying levels of attractiveness, those of the opposite gender of the candidate preferred prettier applicants. Those of the same gender preferred the less attractive applicant however.

The BPS blog reports on a possible explanation for the findings — and it’s exactly what anyone who ever lived through middle school would imagine:

A final study with yet more participants included a measure of their self-esteem. This showed that high self-esteem participants displayed a positive bias not only towards attractive opposite-sex candidates but also towards attractive candidates of their own sex. Agthe and her colleagues said this suggests the usual negative bias against same-sex beautiful people is all to do with the threat they represent, a threat that those with high self-esteem are immune to.

So is in an interview with an insecure member of the same sex the only occasion where being less attractive might benefit your career? Nope, concludes another study that recently appeared in the Being overweight isn’t generally considered a positive characteristic when it comes to looks, nor is it associated with career accelerated career advancement, but the study analyzing weight and wages in Britain reveals that plumper people only suffer lost wages if they’re single. Big Think reports:

After controlling for all other attributes that contribute to wages (an individual��s job experience, firm size, region in which they reside, occupation, sector, full or part-time employment, health, education, age, and whether or not they have young children) the author finds that married men and single women both have a wage rate that is positively

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