Study Suggests Attractive Female Students’ Scores Dropped After Classes Became Online. Is Education Also This Superficial?

By Priyadarshini Malavia Updated November 11, 2022 4:31 AM

We women have a lot of characteristics and don’t really belong to one particular box. We are different people with our own skills and personalities based on a lot of factors. However, one thing that almost every woman can relate to is being judged based on their looks. Women have always been pushed to adhere to societal beauty standards and the ones that do, clearly have an edge above the others. If you think I am exaggerating, a study from Sweden found that attractive female students’ scores dipped after the classes went online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to a recent study published in the journal Economics Letters, classes were shifted online during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may have caused the grades of attractive female college students to go downhill. The test results of 300 Swedish engineering students—300 men and 300 women—were studied by Adrian Mehic, a post-doctoral researcher at Lund University.

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The findings revealed that physical appearance did play a role to some level. The key finding, according to Adrian Mehic, is that there is a premium placed on beauty when training is conducted on-site, for both men and women. However, he claimed that without the in-person teaching and intimate environment, the female co-eds no longer flourished. Data was gathered from 74 independent graders who evaluated the attractiveness of five groups of Swedish engineering students. When taught in person, more beautiful students performed better in various subjects, such as business and economics. That says that it’s possible that attractive people get advantages that less attractive people don’t.

When the classes were conducted online, however, the grades of attractive female students fell. There was no such setback for attractive male students, who tend to be more persistent and have a bigger influence on their friends. He said that this highlights that the beauty premium for guys is due to some productive attribute (e.g. their stronger self-confidence) rather than prejudice, whereas there is discrimination against women.

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Mehic acknowledges that there are still lots of unanswered concerns regarding the matter. Researchers tend to have a difficult time explaining why people make judgments based just on looks, according to Mehic. He hypothesized that this might be because we attribute attractive people with qualities like intelligence that they may not actually have when we first meet them, like beauty. He added that to determine precisely why this occurs, more research is necessary.

It is a shame that even while studying, women have to worry about being judged for their appearance. In something like education, where deciding factors need to be based on skills, intelligence, hard work etc, students are getting the shorter end of the stick simply for not being “attractive enough”. How is this fair to those who genuinely work hard for their courses and exams?