A Tattoo Won’t Hurt Your Job Prospects

Michael T. 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. In fact, tattooed men were slightly more likely to have jobs than other men. The conclusion: A tattoo won’t hurt your job prospects. Professor French, defend your research. French: We went in expecting to find a negative relationship between tattoos and success in the labor market. 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. 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. 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. 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. HBR: So, if I’m a guy struggling to find a job, some ink might help? Well, I’d urge caution about that. We uncovered a correlation but not causation. The message of this research isn’t that you can boost your job prospects by getting a tattoo. It’s that there’s no labor market penalty for having one. Why were you interested in the effect of 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. But nothing much had been done on tattoos. 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 that single question didn’t take tattoo size or location into account. We thought we might get different results by asking about tattoos you could see or that were especially large or considered offensive. Our initial hypothesis was also informed by studies suggesting that tattoos are taboo in the workplace. 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. And in a 2016 study, Andrew found that tattooed applicants were rated significantly less “hirable” for customer-facing jobs. Until recently, tattoos may have been associated with rebellion, criminal activity, or gang membership—nothing you’re looking for in an employee. But times have changed? Yes, some of those studies are more than a decade old. Since then, body art has gained much more acceptance as a form of personal expression, just like your clothing, jewelry, or hairstyle. Among our survey respondents, 23% of men and 37% of women had tattoos. Some estimates suggest that there is a tattooed person in 40% of U.S. households, up from 21% in 1999. I’d also note that, as economists have shown in other contexts, stated preferences don’t always match revealed preferences. You might say you’d hire someone without tattoos over someone with them for a particular job. But when it comes right down to it, you’ll choose the most qualified person, body art or not. Even the U.S. 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. I wonder, though: Is there a blue-collar/white-collar divide? Are tattoos OK for tradespeople but not professionals? That’s something I wish we’d asked about. A 2010 study did show that consumers perceived visible tattoos to be inappropriate in white-collar professions but not in blue-collar ones. 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. Their average annual salary was $36,485 for men and $25,930 for women. In some types of jobs body art might be seen as less of a negative or even a positive. But I suspect that nowadays most people think it’s OK for even doctors, lawyers, and accountants to have tattoos. Women, too? Yep. Women accounted for two-thirds of our sample, but we found no employment or wage penalty for those with body art. And even offensiveness isn’t a deal breaker? Not according to our data. The respondents who told us they had offensive tattoos were just as likely to be employed as those without any tattoos. But we were relying on self-reporting, so our sample size on that measure was small. And offensiveness is subjective. Is a Confederate flag a symbol of Southern heritage or racial oppression? It’s also possible the offensive tattoos were in places people could cover up. Is cultural context important? Would you get different results in other countries? My gut instinct is that we’d see the same findings in Western Europe. In places like Eastern Europe and South America, we might even see that tattoos are more valued. I’m not sure about Asia. This would be a way to extend our research. I have to ask: Do you have a tattoo? I have a few. On one calf I have a campfire and on the other my favorite motorcycling road. On my bicep I have a waterfall scene, and on the inside of my left forearm, I have a colorful arrow, which I get lots of compliments on. I got my first one 10 years ago. And sorry to get even more personal, but how old are you now? 57. Hmm. What if all the employed people with tattoos only got them once they were established in their careers—as you did? And that’s why they suffer no penalty? We note in the study that we have no information on the timing of tattoos. It’s possible that when you reach a certain earnings threshold, you say, “OK, I’ll get a tattoo now.” But the Pew Research Center has reported that 38% of Millennials have tattoos. So we’re definitely talking about people early in their careers, too. What’s next in the field of tattoo research? We plan to use eye-movement tracking technology to see how people respond to photos of visible and offensive tattoos. But honestly, I feel that if our findings can be replicated with different samples, researchers should spend less time studying tattoos as they relate to employment and earnings. We should study other potentially stigmatized groups and try to correct real, not just perceived, biases.

A Tattoo Won’t Hurt Your Job Prospects

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