We've long agreed as a society that manly dudes are more likely to be in-charge types, from clubbing their mate of choice and dragging her back to the cave to heading up our nation's largest companies and accounting firms (we're looking directly at you, Jim Turley's imposing jawline).
Now, we learn that manly dudes are also more likely to fudge numbers and get caught pulling shady scams.
Justin Lahart writes in WSJ's MoneyBeat:
Yuping Jia at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, with Laurence van Lent and Yachang Zeng at Tilburg University, collected pictures of 1,136 male chief executives at companies in the S&P 1500, and used a facial-structure metric to gauge how masculine each one’s face was.
Tracing employment histories from 1996 to 2010, they found the risk of financial misreporting was substantially higher for executives with more masculine faces. Greater facial masculinity was also associated with more enforcement actions, and higher incidences of insider trading and stock-option backdating.
The researchers claim they can actually predict a firm's likelihood of being subject to an SEC enforcement action based on a CEO's facial masculinity.
Yeah? OK, maybe we can see that.
Then again, Greg Kyte is pretty manly-looking and last we heard, he's SUPER ethical.
If you've been considering growing a beard, maybe at least wait until the PCAOB inspectors have left the building.
