It is time to take seriously the painful consequences of appearance discrimination in the workplace
is professor of political theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK. His books include Living Together as Equals: The Demands of Citizenship (2012) and What’s Wrong with Lookism? Personal Appearance, Discrimination, and Disadvantage (2023).
We’d be outraged if a business owner told an employee she wouldn’t receive her bonus unless she lost weight. With most jobs, our looks should be regarded as irrelevant to our suitability and remuneration. What matters is that we have the skills for the job and put them to good use. Yet appearance discrimination, or ‘lookism’, is pervasive and consequential in the workplace. Can lookism in employment ever be justified? And, when it can’t, should we legislate against it?
The first of these questions might seem to have an easy answer, namely, that lookism can be justified only when appearance is a genuine qualification for work, that is, has a real bearing on a person’s ability to do a job or do it well, such as modelling or some acting roles. But this just pushes back the problem. We must now ask: when is appearance a genuine qualification for a job? And even: should genuine qualifications always count, or can there be moral reasons for not counting them?
