My wife recently sent me a link to a Reddit post in which some woman wrote about her experience in Finance. As a recent graduate, she makes six figures, working in “investor relations”. Details were a bit sparse but her job consists of flying around, looking good, and staying in fancy hotels. While I do not know a lot about the finance industry, I know enough that I do not fundamentally doubt that such jobs exist. There are plenty of other jobs women get, primarily due to looks, but there is also a segment of the labor market that is open to women regardless of looks.

In my day job in tech, I occasionally talk to third-party vendors, i.e. companies that want to sell products or services. When you meet with those people, you normally face a pair of them, a more technical guy and a woman, often somewhat young and moderately attractive, who seems to have no clear purpose. I recall one such face-to-face meeting where the woman said absolutely nothing of significance. She did a bit of small talk at the beginning and end. Otherwise, she just sat there in her pantsuit, nodding along. Presumably she was only there so that I could look at her in case I got tired of looking at her fat, unkempt male colleague.

Such customer-facing roles in tech, and presumably finance, too, are normally only open to reasonably attractive women, and the same is true for many other positions, even seemingly less important ones. I used to joke that if a company does not have a hot or at least cute receptionist, is is probably not a good place to work for but I think there is a lot of truth to that. Think about it: attractive women have their pick among employers. They could work as a receptionist or HR drone anywhere so any company that does get to hire them probably has more going for itself than the competition. It clearly is a competitive advantage to have attractive women in these roles. Certainly, I am a lot less interested in talking to some fat, middle-aged chick versus a bubbly twenty-two year old recent graduate. They both are clueless anyway.

Lastly, there is the problem of DIE/DEI, meaning that companies need to hire women and minorities. Obviously, if you need to hire women, and you do not want to demoralize your workforce, you better hire the better-looking ones. In tech, this often does not mean a lot, though. If you have to hire a woman and qualifications are more or less irrelevant, which is also the case in plenty of tech-adjacent roles, then why would you go for women nobody wants to look at? There is a corner case, however: if there already is a significant number of women in a company, it seems to happen, for whatever reason, that young, attractive women have a hard time getting hired. I have also witnessed that female managers, after joining a company, show downright hostile behavior towards women who are more attractive than them. I have even witnessed female managers bullying women on their team as they perceived them as competition. Men, of course, do not care about a woman’s job. The vast majority of men strongly prefer a cute woman in her early 20s over her manager who is fifteen years older, regardless of her looks.

I would not be too envious of women, though, because they do not have such an easy ride. Many of them are plagued by the supposed “imposter syndrome”, not realizing that they really are imposters who are not able to do their job. Also, they better make use of their good looks while they have them. I have rarely seen a woman in the workforce past the age of 40 who seemed to enjoy her work. There is a reason why seemingly every woman who can leaves the labor market once this is viable, which it normally is after marrying some guy who does reasonably well.