Do you have a smoldering CEO or a total babe for a boss? If the musings of a recent University of Wisconsin report are correct, you could be benefitting in a big way.
According to the 33-page paper, “Beauty is Wealth: CEO Appearance and Shareholder Value,” attractiveness plays a large role in stock returns and compensation.
In measuring the attractiveness of nearly 700 CEOs from S&P 500 companies, researchers Joseph Tayler Halford and Hung-Chia Hsu established a connection between attractive CEOs and higher returns that was unrelated to the firm’s actual performance.
“In a competitive labor market, given the evidence that better looking CEOs receive higher pay, we should expect that more attractive CEOs contribute to shareholder value in some way,” Hsu and Halford wrote.
The researchers measured attractiveness by uploading CEO photos to the website anaface.com, which assigns a “Facial Attractiveness Index” based on facial geometry and the so-called “golden ratio” on a scale of 10.
Want to see if showcasing your boss’s face could result in a weightier paycheck? Anaface.com allows you to upload your CEO’s photo and score it. Scores of 7.29 or higher may be cause to start plastering their image on all your corporate communications.
