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"The Internet's Meeting Place for ESL/EFL Teachers from Around the World!"
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willteachforfood
Joined: 24 Jan 2011
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 Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 1:11 am Post subject: |
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| Space Cowboy wrote: |
And always amusing: Three-fourths of respondents think they're above the 50th percentile in attractiveness.  |
There could be more to this, however....in general, in any society, the educated people are more attractive. Whether this be access to better health care, money to go to the gym, or to buy beauty products/clothes, or whatever economics-based factors lead to better looks or simply better genes...in general smart people have good genes and tend to be physically attractive as well (comparatively).
Anyhow, I didn't word that as well as I would have liked...but basically the idea is that across the board, the percentage of university education folk who are 'reasonably' attractive is going to be MUCH higher than the non university educated demographic.....so it's very possible that 3/4 of ESL teachers are in the top 50% of good looks, especially when you factor in the fact that adventurous people, like those who travel and go to live abroad, tend to be more interested in outdoor/physical activities. |
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jrwhite82
Joined: 22 May 2010
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 5:01 am Post subject: |
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| I'd love to believe you...but we tend to be a more unattractive bunch in my opinion (myself excluded of course!) |
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willteachforfood
Joined: 24 Jan 2011
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 5:49 am Post subject: |
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| jrwhite82 wrote: |
| I'd love to believe you...but we tend to be a more unattractive bunch in my opinion (myself excluded of course!) |
We as in ESL teachers? or we as in college grads?
Either way...I disagree...go to a Nascar race or a Wal-Mart and you will see what I am talking about. |
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northway
Joined: 05 Jul 2010
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 9:35 am Post subject: |
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| jrwhite82 wrote: |
| I'd love to believe you...but we tend to be a more unattractive bunch in my opinion (myself excluded of course!) |
I wonder if the bar goes down the farther from Seoul you get. |
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southernman
Joined: 15 Jan 2010
Location: On the mainland again
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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| northway wrote: |
| jrwhite82 wrote: |
| I'd love to believe you...but we tend to be a more unattractive bunch in my opinion (myself excluded of course!) |
I wonder if the bar goes down the farther from Seoul you get. |
Possibly true but then again its hard to find a mix of intelligence and beauty wherever you are  |
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jrwhite82
Joined: 22 May 2010
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| Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2011 6:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Haha. I wonder why that is? Well, we will get some answers soon to see if our views on the community are true or not! 98 responses so far! |
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naturegirl321
Joined: 18 Jul 2006
Location: Home sweet home
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 3:45 am Post subject: |
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| Space Cowboy wrote: |
| And always amusing: Three-fourths of respondents think they're above the 50th percentile in attractiveness. "Self-described stunners" would be the key word; what would be fun would be to provide a set of photos to both hagwon owners and other NETs, and then ask them to rate the teacher's attractiveness. Obviously not a feasible idea, but still... |
Well, we DO live in a country where plastic surgery is prevelant. I've had more than one student admit to going under the knife, maybe the same is true for the foreigners here. |
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PatrickGHBusan
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: Busan (1997-2008) Canada 2008 -
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 3:53 am Post subject: |
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| Yellowstone_1872 wrote: |
Jr,
If you would care to share the stats from this, I've got a degree in statistics and I'd love to poke around in your survey results to see if the expected correlations with white/attractive and higher wage/better situations show up.
Let me know if you are willing to share the info. You can PM me or just reply on the board. |
Good one!
Correlation for an informal, unscientific online survey!
By the way, OP, you did a decent job with the survey and I am sure it will produce some interesting tidbits of information. Just do not draw any conclusions from this...that would be a mistake.  |
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PatrickGHBusan
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: Busan (1997-2008) Canada 2008 -
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 3:57 am Post subject: |
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| willteachforfood wrote: |
| Space Cowboy wrote: |
| And always amusing: Three-fourths of respondents think they're above the 50th percentile in attractiveness. |
There could be more to this, however....in general, in any society, the educated people are more attractive. Whether this be access to better health care, money to go to the gym, or to buy beauty products/clothes, or whatever economics-based factors lead to better looks or simply better genes...in general smart people have good genes and tend to be physically attractive as well (comparatively).
Anyhow, I didn't word that as well as I would have liked...but basically the idea is that across the board, the percentage of university education folk who are 'reasonably' attractive is going to be MUCH higher than the non university educated demographic.....so it's very possible that 3/4 of ESL teachers are in the top 50% of good looks, especially when you factor in the fact that adventurous people, like those who travel and go to live abroad, tend to be more interested in outdoor/physical activities. |
Well thats interesting. Walk around a university graduate school lately? Teeming with studs and studettes! Profs that could be on the cover of GQ or modeling but choose to do research.
All jokes aside, you make one good point: educated people tend to come from or end up in a more affluent socio-economic group and hence tend to eat better and have better access to health services. Thats where it ends however.
As for 50% of Eslers being in the good looks category...thats nice, look around at our fellow Eslers lately? Also, the answers you get in this survey are informal at best, they produce no conclusions anyone serious would rely on. They will produce some interesting discussion point but beyond that, it would be best not to use this information to draw out any conclusions....or please do, it will be entertaining! |
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Skipperoo
Joined: 05 Jul 2010
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 5:44 am Post subject: |
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| The above 50% thing is known as the 'better than average' effect (in short: Over 50% of people will rate themselves as 'better than average' at any given positive trait - even modesty ), and it's why self-surveys are typically not particularly good at measuring much besides someone's ego |
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jrwhite82
Joined: 22 May 2010
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 6:07 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, you're right about that. I often claim I am the most modest person in the world. I find that hilarious to say as a joke, but a lot of people don't get it....
I couldn't figure out a way to get to the bottom of the long held idea about the importance of looks in finding a job. Earlier, someone said giving recruiters and hagwon owners random pictures paired with random resumes and seeing if they chose the hot blonde girl with the crap resume over the ugly fat guy with a Harvard doctorate in TESOL. That's probably your best bet. I would LOVE for someone to do that survey. |
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PatrickGHBusan
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: Busan (1997-2008) Canada 2008 -
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 8:20 am Post subject: |
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| jrwhite82 wrote: |
Yeah, you're right about that. I often claim I am the most modest person in the world. I find that hilarious to say as a joke, but a lot of people don't get it....
I couldn't figure out a way to get to the bottom of the long held idea about the importance of looks in finding a job. Earlier, someone said giving recruiters and hagwon owners random pictures paired with random resumes and seeing if they chose the hot blonde girl with the crap resume over the ugly fat guy with a Harvard doctorate in TESOL. That's probably your best bet. I would LOVE for someone to do that survey. |
That would require a lot of manpower, resources and would have to take place over an extended period for the results to have any credibility in a scientific manner. |
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Yellowstone_1872
Joined: 12 Nov 2010
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 9:21 am Post subject: |
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| PatrickGHBusan wrote: |
| jrwhite82 wrote: |
I couldn't figure out a way to get to the bottom of the long held idea about the importance of looks in finding a job. Earlier, someone said giving recruiters and hagwon owners random pictures paired with random resumes and seeing if they chose the hot blonde girl with the crap resume over the ugly fat guy with a Harvard doctorate in TESOL. That's probably your best bet. I would LOVE for someone to do that survey. |
That would require a lot of manpower, resources and would have to take place over an extended period for the results to have any credibility in a scientific manner. |
Maybe to see how frequent the job offers came you would need a lot of people, but if you just wanted to see how many schools reviewed the applications and offered interviews, it would be pretty easy to bomb out a few thousand email applications in a couple of weeks. Randomizing picture/resume combinations would be pretty simple too, with some of the mass email programs on the market.
I don't see why a time component would have any relevance in this case. I guess if you wanted a time series to see changes over time that would be useful, but if all you want is a snapshot of the market right now, it seems like a cross-sectional study would be an acceptable fit. |
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PatrickGHBusan
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: Busan (1997-2008) Canada 2008 -
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 11:15 am Post subject: |
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| Yellowstone_1872 wrote: |
| PatrickGHBusan wrote: |
| jrwhite82 wrote: |
I couldn't figure out a way to get to the bottom of the long held idea about the importance of looks in finding a job. Earlier, someone said giving recruiters and hagwon owners random pictures paired with random resumes and seeing if they chose the hot blonde girl with the crap resume over the ugly fat guy with a Harvard doctorate in TESOL. That's probably your best bet. I would LOVE for someone to do that survey. |
That would require a lot of manpower, resources and would have to take place over an extended period for the results to have any credibility in a scientific manner. |
Maybe to see how frequent the job offers came you would need a lot of people, but if you just wanted to see how many schools reviewed the applications and offered interviews, it would be pretty easy to bomb out a few thousand email applications in a couple of weeks. Randomizing picture/resume combinations would be pretty simple too, with some of the mass email programs on the market.
I don't see why a time component would have any relevance in this case. I guess if you wanted a time series to see changes over time that would be useful, but if all you want is a snapshot of the market right now, it seems like a cross-sectional study would be an acceptable fit. |
Time is important to show a trend in this case. A snapshot would be near meaningless.
The exercise would be interesting I am sure but unless the parameters are clearly set before launching such an experiment, all you will get is a bunch of unreliable information. In the case of a quick snapshot, you will only get a less reliable picture.
This will never be done but if it was you would have to have strick parameters laid out before starting out, clear evaluation guidelines to sift and separate the results and a reasonable time period and sample to get something representative.
You would need to differenciate between ESL sectors (Universities, Companies, Hakwons, PS, Kindergartens...) for example.
You would also need to look at what time of the year you run this test.
Shooting off mass emails with randomized CVs will not accomplish this as a lot of the stuff would end up in the spam box of recruiters.
What would the aim be? To find out how many recruiters respond to CVs with nice pictures? The initial reply would most likely be an auto-generated email reply along the lines of: we have received your application and will contact you....
The follow up message would be interesting as the "applicant" would not be able to respond, hence would get dismissed. What does that prove? |
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Yellowstone_1872
Joined: 12 Nov 2010
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| Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2011 12:02 pm Post subject: |
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| PatrickGHBusan wrote: |
Time is important to show a trend in this case. A snapshot would be near meaningless.
The exercise would be interesting I am sure but unless the parameters are clearly set before launching such an experiment, all you will get is a bunch of unreliable information. In the case of a quick snapshot, you will only get a less reliable picture.
This will never be done but if it was you would have to have strick parameters laid out before starting out, clear evaluation guidelines to sift and separate the results and a reasonable time period and sample to get something representative.
You would need to differenciate between ESL sectors (Universities, Companies, Hakwons, PS, Kindergartens...) for example.
You would also need to look at what time of the year you run this test.
Shooting off mass emails with randomized CVs will not accomplish this as a lot of the stuff would end up in the spam box of recruiters.
What would the aim be? To find out how many recruiters respond to CVs with nice pictures? The initial reply would most likely be an auto-generated email reply along the lines of: we have received your application and will contact you....
The follow up message would be interesting as the "applicant" would not be able to respond, hence would get dismissed. What does that prove? |
Meh.
A cross sectional study is a perfect fit for this situation. Time progression is uncalled for if you are only trying to prove or disprove the existence of some kind of bias on the part of Korean employers.
My experience with fielding email surveys tells me that this is all much easier than you seem to think it is. There are tools like constant contact that really cut out most of the junk mail/spam problems, and monitoring an email feed is honestly pretty easy. You could form a pretty decent test just by seeing how many of the second round (not auto-reply) messages the attractive candidates got versus the unattractive candidates.
It's worth noting that there have been several of these kinds of studies done. There's a good example titled "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." It's by Bertrand and Mullainathan, and was published in The American Economic Review in 2004. They were just sending resumes with different names (and experimentally variable resume quality). In Korea you have the "advantage" of sending actual pictures, so you don't even have to depend on employers reading between the lines on race/appearance of the applicant. This study gives a really good overview of how you could do a similar study, and with resources like the job board on Dave's, I honestly think it would be pretty easy to replicate.
If anyone is curious, the study can be found here (http://www.scribd.com/doc/14577725/Are-Emily-and-Greg-More-Employable-than-Lakisha-and-Jamal-A-Field-Experiment-on-Labor-Market-Discrimination-by-Marianne-Bertrand-and-Sendhil-Mull). It finds about a 50% difference in callback rate based on having a "white" or "black" name in Chicago or Boston in the USA. |
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