From Beauty Pays: Why it's Better to be a Beautiful Woman and Worse to be an Ugly Man

This week, we’re soliciting your questions for Dan Hamermesh about his new book, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful. To stir up some ideas and discussion, here are a couple tables from the book illustrating how perceived beauty breaks down along gender, and also the income premium attractive people enjoy over their average-looking counterparts.
 
This table shows a typical distribution of ratings of individuals’ looks. Notice that more people are rated as good- than as bad-looking, and that there is more dispersion in women’s beauty than in men’s.

 
This table summarizes the earnings advantages of good-looking and disadvantages of bad-looking workers as compared to the roughly 50 percent of workers whose looks are rated as average.  Notice that the effects are bigger for men than for women,which has subsequently been observed in many studies.