As if work isn’t difficult enough. It turns out that as well as being brilliant all day every day, lucky and well connected, there are several other factors for becoming successful that are beyond our control. For example, how tall you are, your name, what time you get up in the mornings and even the colour of your hair can have a bearing on how much you get paid and whether you’ll be promoted.
This doesn’t mean that you have to be a hirsute, athletic, early-rising two-metre blond with a fabulous name to go far. After all, Winston Churchill didn’t do so badly in life. Bill Gates is small and ginger, and Margaret Thatcher certainly wasn’t a blonde bombshell. It just means that there are influences outside of the ordinary that could affect the way in which you’re seen.
A University of Florida study found that tall people throughout their lives earned considerably more than those shorter than them. The study is backed up by researchers in Finland, who found that one-year-old babies who were tall for their age ended up with above-average incomes by the time they reached 50.
”These findings are troubling in that, with a few exceptions such as professional basketball, no one could argue that height is an essential ability required for job performance, nor a bona fide occupational qualification,” said Timothy Judge, one of the professors behind the University of Florida study.
So why, if you don’t physically become better at running a company when tall, can height impact on earnings and success? One theory is that better nutrition in developed countries means that taller people are more intelligent. Another holds that they can physically dominate negotiations by, for example, leaning over their counterparts.
Evidence suggests that your name, and the letters therein, can influence the way you live and even how well you do at work. A study in the United States found that children whose initials included the letters C or D tended to get C and D grades at school. Equally, those with A and B initials did better than they should. The theory is that people are drawn to their initials, and therefore don’t mind getting bad grades that feature those letters, if (and it’s a crucial ”if”) they like them. The key to ensuring success might be as simple as changing your name to Astounding Boombastic. Perhaps.
You’re not allowed to be racist, sexist or ageist in the workplace, but discrimination against the overweight is something of a grey area. In particular, obese white women suffer most. In a Yale study, 53% said their coworkers stigmatised them and 43% said that extended to their employers in general. For the purposes of the study, stigmatised translates into not getting jobs, missing out on promotions, being fired or workplace harassment.
And it’s not just self-esteem that suffers — the overweight tend to earn between one and six percent less than their slimmer colleagues.
It’s not necessarily laziness — some people are simply predisposed to sleep in the mornings and work later at night. These owls, as they’re known in the sleep-patterns world, are the opposite of larks, who wake up and go to sleep early.
One in 10 people are naturally early risers, two in 10 are crawl-out-of-bed-at-midday types and the rest of us fall somewhere in between.
Your natural rhythms also affect when you are at your most productive, when you want to eat and when you are most affable — all important factors in planning a work day.
”As we get older,” says sleep therapist Jens Tugend, ”we sleep less anyway. But in the early stages of a career it’s good to think about the hours you’re most effective at, and see if your employer can accommodate them.”
Then there’s the matter of hair. A German study found that fair-haired barmaids earned 20% more in tips than dark-haired ones.
There’s no word about whether the results were repeated for men, but it is notable that in another study, this time in Paris, people of both genders performed worse on a general knowledge test after being shown pictures of blonde beauty queens. The theory put forward by the scientists is that men become idiots when confronted with blondes and the stereotypes they embody, while women feel threatened and are therefore distracted. Hmmm.
An example of a bias against bald men (and women) at work lies in politics. The United Kingdom hasn’t had a bald prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home in 1963/64, and he wasn’t even elected. Of course, one of the country’s most famous leaders — Sir Winston Churchill — wasn’t exactly hirsute up top. But he never had to contest an election against anyone with a full head of hair. The same is true in the United States, where to find an instance of a bald man beating one with hair to the top job you have to go back to 1881, when James Abram Garfield became president.
If bald men struggle to get elected, does it follow that they’ll also struggle to win friends and influence people in the wider workplace? A study by the Emnid Institute in Munich found that bald men were twice as likely to be turned down for a job than those with hair. They were seen to be ”less dynamic”. Which would presumably come as a shock to Michael Jordan. — Â