alt Hacker NewsAn alternative story could be that the women’s presented appearance online may have changed more than men’s and that real appearance changes could weaken the correlation between the paper’s stored photo-based beauty score and what instructors actually saw live. Maybe woman changed grooming effort more than men, or the effects of fashion trends that explicitly drove the woman towards less attractive styles etc.
if that mismatch increased more for women than men, the estimated “beauty premium” for women could fall even without any change in teachers’ discriminatory behavior. The paper just assumes the attractiveness stayed constant during the period, but seems to have had no data to verify this.
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aren't online curses a lot text only which inherently is harder to communicate
very important observation indeed, if that wasn't accounted for it means much less to me
Attractive females might also have different behavior in remote teaching. Attractiveness directly affects how people behave and feel. This might also be different for males vs. females.
I'm sure that attractiveness does play a role for grades, it's just not nearly as simple as the paper puts it.
There are a lot of potential explanations, which is why these kinds of studies are unfortunately not that helpful and often cause questionable media coverage.