Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful: Acknowledging appearance mitigates the “beauty is beastly” effect

• Three studies examine effects of acknowledging appearance on attractiveness bias.
• Acknowledging appearance or sex mitigated beauty is beastly (BIB) effect.
• Acknowledgment effect mediated by increased perceptions of masculinity and decreased perceptions of counter-communion.
• Acknowledgment reduces effects of rater hostile sexism on evaluations.
• Acknowledgment enhances benefits of rater benevolent sexism on evaluations.

Physically attractive women are discriminated against when applying for masculine sex-typed jobs, a phenomenon known as the beauty is beastly effect. We conducted three studies to establish an intervention for mitigating the beauty is beastly effect and to determine mediators and moderators of the intervention. As expected, physically attractive women were rated higher in employment suitability when they acknowledged that their sex or physical appearance is incongruent with the typical applicant for a masculine sex-typed job. Acknowledgement increased inferences of positive masculine traits, allowing the female applicant to be perceived as more suitable for the job, while reducing perceptions that she possessed countercommunal traits, decreasing the violation of her gender role. Finally, sexist beliefs interacted with the acknowledgment intervention, such that the acknowledgement intervention reduced the negative relationship between hostile sexism and employment suitability and increased the positive relationship between benevolent sexism and employment suitability, relative to the control condition.