In some types of jobs body art might be seen as less of a negative or even a positive. Their average annual salary was $36,485 for men and $25,930 for women. And it’s possible that the people we surveyed were mostly in lower-paying jobs, since they’d volunteered to answer our questions for a small fee on Mechanical Turk. A 2010 study did show that consumers perceived visible tattoos to be inappropriate in white-collar professions but not in blue-collar ones. That’s something I wish we’d asked about. I wonder, though: Is there a blue-collar/white-collar divide? Are tattoos OK for tradespeople but not professionals? Marines now allow recruits to have visible tattoos anywhere but the face, because when tattoos were banned, the organization found it was losing out on good candidates. But when it comes right down to it, you’ll choose the most qualified person, body art or not. You might say you’d hire someone without tattoos over someone with them for a particular job. I’d also note that, as economists have shown in other contexts, stated preferences don’t always match revealed preferences. Some estimates suggest that there is a tattooed person in 40% of U.S. Among our survey respondents, 23% of men and 37% of women had tattoos. Since then, body art has gained much more acceptance as a form of personal expression, just like your clothing, jewelry, or hairstyle. Yes, some of those studies are more than a decade old. Until recently, tattoos may have been associated with rebellion, criminal activity, or gang membership-nothing you’re looking for in an employee. And in a 2016 study, Andrew found that tattooed applicants were rated significantly less “hirable” for customer-facing jobs. One showed that tattooed people were perceived to be less honest, motivated, and intelligent in another, 80% of HR managers and recruiters expressed negative feelings about visible ink on prospective employees. Our initial hypothesis was also informed by studies suggesting that tattoos are taboo in the workplace. We thought we might get different results by asking about tattoos you could see or that were especially large or considered offensive.
But that single question didn’t take tattoo size or location into account. Initially, we could find only two existing data sets in which people had been asked, “Do you have a tattoo?” When we compared their responses with their employment status, we also found no significant correlation. But nothing much had been done on tattoos. There’s been a lot of research on the career effects of other personal characteristics-race, age, beauty, health, height, weight, and disabilities-and of behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and drug use. Why were you interested in the effect of tattoos? It’s that there’s no labor market penalty for having one. The message of this research isn’t that you can boost your job prospects by getting a tattoo. We uncovered a correlation but not causation. HBR: So, if I’m a guy struggling to find a job, some ink might help? We even saw two small positive correlations: Men who had tattoos were 7% more likely to be employed than men who didn’t have them, and both men and women with tattoos worked more hours per week. Regardless of size, number, visibility, or offensiveness, tattoos don’t seem to stop people from finding jobs or bringing in as much pay as everyone else. But in this analysis, after we controlled for factors that could affect job prospects-such as alcohol use and whether people had been in jail-we found no significant correlation between body art and employment or earnings. My coauthors-Karoline Mortensen, who is also at Miami, and Andrew Timming of the University of Western Australia-and I thought we might see a wage penalty or employment difficulties, because hiring managers have said in previous studies that they’d discriminate against tattooed candidates. Professor French, defend your research.įrench: We went in expecting to find a negative relationship between tattoos and success in the labor market. The conclusion: A tattoo won’t hurt your job prospects. In fact, tattooed men were slightly more likely to have jobs than other men. French of the University of Miami and colleagues surveyed more than 2,000 people in the United States and found that those with tattoos were no less likely to be employed than their uninked counterparts, and that average earnings were the same for both groups.