Lemondrop

Apparently, in Europe, it's become a trend to embed a picture of yourself into your resume, you know, to give it a little extra personality. We are relieved it's not a trend here. (We have a hard enough time picking a profile pic for Facebook.)

Some researchers thought this was interesting, so they decided to send resumes to almost 3,000 job openings. For each job they sent two nearly identical resumes, but one resume had no picture and the other featured a picture of either a plain or attractive person. What did they find?

If you're a good-looking guy, great news: Resumes with attractive men were selected for job interviews at a much higher rate than resumes with either a plain-looking man or no picture at all.

But if you're a woman, it's apparently best to reveal nothing at all. Women with no pictures on their resumes were called in for interviews way more often than plain-looking or attractive women.

The researchers think jealousy may be involved, but to us this seems like an obvious demonstration of the fact that once you throw a woman's appearance into the pot, the people evaluating her will think of little other than that. Education, work experience, ability to construct a resume -- none of those things matter once you can judge a woman on the old standby of prettiness. A man who is handsome is just a living example of the cherry on top of a sundae of job qualification, but a woman has to be the exact amount of attractiveness to avoid distracting from her abilities, and that's nearly impossible.