Appearance and Social Inequalities: Physical Attractiveness as a Part of Occupation-Congruent Appearance
Abstract
Appearance-based inequalities are gaining increasing interest in sociology. This article is the first to systematically examine the extent to which attractiveness is linked to culturally shared ideas of representatives of different occupations. We conceptualise these cultural expectations as ‘occupation-congruent appearance’. To understand the gendered dynamics between attractiveness and looking ‘congruent’, we analyse large-scale photograph data representing a heterogeneous group of different occupations ( n = 1411), including population-level ratings on those photographs ( n = 3456). We find that for both men and women, attractiveness is generally associated with an increase in perceived occupation-congruent appearance. However, this association is gendered, so the differences between occupational categories are greater for men than for women. Therefore, we argue that attractiveness can magnify appearance-based status differences, particularly among men. The research opens new perspectives to examine appearance and inequalities, not only from the perspective of looking attractive, but also through looking congruent.
Ingestion failed: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/srv/app/app/worker.py", line 85, in run_once process_job(db, job) File "/srv/app/app/worker.py", line 39, in process_job pdf_path, info = fetch_pdf_temp(candidate["url"]) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/srv/app/app/downloader.py", line 129, in fetch_pdf_temp raise ValueError(f"PDF source returned HTTP {response.status_code}.") ValueError: PDF source returned HTTP 403.
No local PDF is available.
GROBID Extracted text; discontinued.
This text is generated from TEI extraction for accessibility, search, and TTS. Formulas, tables, figures, page layout, and references may not perfectly match the original PDF.
No accessible text representation is available. The text extraction service has been discontinued for the time being. If you require this service, for accessibility or any other reason, please submit an issue/request on this page.
Metadata
Issues
No public issues have been filed for this DOI.
Submit an issue
Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-001-0232713 |