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.

Never back down tattoo