Skin Colour Counts?
HEADLINE: Fair Skin Can Get You More Money.Light-skinned immigrants in the United States make more money on average than those with darker complexions, and the chief reason appears to be discrimination, a researcher says.
Joni Hersch, a law and economics professor at Vanderbilt University, looked at a government survey of 2,084 legal immigrants to the United States from around the world and found that those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8% to 15% more than similar immigrants with much darker skin.
"On average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education," Hersch said. The study also found that taller immigrants earn more than shorter ones, with an extra inch of height associated with a 1% increase in income.
Other researchers said the findings are consistent with other studies on colour and point to a skin-tone prejudice that goes beyond race.
Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, such as English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin, and found that skin tone still seemed to make a difference in earnings. That means that if two similar immigrants from Bangladesh, for example, came to the United States at the same time, with the same occupation and ability to speak English, the lighter-skinned immigrant would make more money on average.
"I thought that once we controlled for race and nationality, I expected the difference to go away, but even with people from the same country, the same race — skin colour really matters," she said, "and height".
Although many cultures show a bias toward lighter skin, Hersch said her analysis shows that the skin-colour advantage was not due to preferential treatment for light-skinned people in their country of origin. The bias, she said, occurs in the US.
Economics professor Shelley White-Means of the University of Tennessee at Memphis said the study adds to the growing body of evidence that there is a "preference for whiteness" in America that goes beyond race.
***** I would like to think that such superficial preferences do not exist to a very large extent in Malaysia. What do you feel?
Image - Source
Labels: Discrimination.
posted by The Malaysian. at 1/29/2007 11:30:00 AM
3 Comments:
Heh..heh...heh..nice to take a break from politics.
I often get involved in hiring decisions in my organisation, and I'm also a keen observer of how other organisations hire people. At my end of the game, hard skills are important, and often the high achievers are quite plain looking girls or guys. But there are also many other jobs around where looks do matter, sometimes quite important. Fairer skin, independent of the ethnic background, is part and parcel of what's considered attractive, whether we like it or not.
I don't like it, partly because I have relatively dark skin, but life's like that...sigh...:-(
haha, kittykat, maybe life is not that like that. A lot of people are working on fairer skin and that is why the whitening cream is a huge market :)
so this is not simply about race-discrimination but rather skin colour. But to be frank lar, preference of whiteness does not occur in US only, in India also you can "see", like the Bollywood actress?
I think there is some of this locally, too. It's one of those universal, deep-seated sub-concious behavioral attributes. Even in popular culture worldwide, white is generally associated with good, black with bad or evil.
Incidentally, in relation to this, in Star Wars, the characterizations of Darth Vader (in black) and the Storm Troopers (in white), was a contrasting visual-play of "all is not what it seems", where 'white' does not always represent good, and 'black', while generally representing the evil characterization of Vader hid a deep-seated desire to return to good.
The only area (to my personal knowledge) where dark is preferred to light is chocolates. But perhaps this is because the word "chocolate" in itself implies something dark, not light. Which to me doesn't really matter because chocolates are my Achilles Heel...
Okay, enough of this mindless banter... the point is that I think there is some truth to this preference anywhere, not just in the US or even here in Malaysia, but is part of our deep-seated conditioning.
The same, probably, applies to height. Tall is always better than short. Which is probably why Walski prefers beer in a pilsner glass, versus the kopi-tiam short glass way of serving said beverage...
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