Beauty premia in wage offers: Evidence from Vietnamese online job postings

We analyze a sample of nearly 40,000 gender-targeted online job vacancies in Vietnam from February 2019 to July 2020 to estimate wage offer premia for physical attractiveness and how they vary between genders. Specifically, we compare the monthly wages offered in matched vacancies with and without attractiveness requirements for job advertisements targeting men and women separately. Our estimates point to a gender asymmetry in how stated physical attractiveness preferences relate to posted wages: physically attractive women are offered higher salaries, whereas physically attractive men are not. Cross-sectional matching estimates place the premium for women at about five percentage points; specifications with firm fixed effects attenuate this magnitude but preserve the asymmetry. Further analysis reveals that gender differences in the wage offer premia to physical attractiveness are mainly driven by attitudes toward gender roles, employer characteristics, and perceived lack of fit, rather than by the potential productivity-enhancing effects of physical attractiveness in certain occupations.