Beauty and the Bias: India Inc needs more sensitivity

livemint.com:

Swetha Totapally, regional director, Asia-Pacific, Dalberg Advisers, a consulting firm, needed help with her saree. The hotel staff who helped her was in her early twenties, and like it often happens, between pins and pleats, the two women started exchanging stories about their work. Totapally got to know that the young employee on the last leg of her night shift at the five-star hotel did not want to work in the hospitality sector.

She had a degree from an air-hostess training academy, but was rejected and asked to re-apply after a year. She did not need more training or any other qualification. She just had to return for interviews without her...

well, braces. Dental braces are not a safety hazard. They just did not “look good," and she could try again once her “crooked teeth" were “fixed." A 20-something lost out on a job opportunity that she had trained for because she did not fit the desired beauty standards.

At a time when corporates are holding in-house sessions and audits on diversity, equity and inclusion, a primitive gauge for screening a candidate’s potential, physical appearance, still seems embedded deeply in our and therefore our corporate culture’s DNA. This beauty bias, often called ‘lookism,’ is arguably getting accentuated as we get used to and mistakenly accept artificial enhancements of physical beauty around us as mere adjustments of reality. Software touch-ups are common.

Through apps that go beyond filtering out blotches, social-media pressure and a looks fixation has led many to modify their appearance to fit a standard mould. And a set of crooked teeth can become an anomaly that needs to be covered up or removed to protect the shiny, bright, youthful and aspirational image of a company. Although