International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

‘Labour and Gender’ is our Topic of the Month for May 2023. On this topic, enjoy Free Access to this article by Petra Raudenská Anýžová (Institute for Social and Economic Analyses, Czech Republic) and Petr Mateju (Institute for Social and Economic Analyses, Czech Republic) published in International Sociology, Beauty still matters: The role of attractiveness in labour market outcomes. Read on to know more about the authors’ trajectory and work.

Petra Raudenská Anýžová

Petr Mateju

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engaged on that research?

P. Raudenská: When I worked at the Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (2013-16), I was a professional colleague of Prof. Mateju and a member of his research team. He and his colleague Simona Weidnerová were passionately interested in how beauty and attractiveness contribute to success in life, and they submitted the successful project on this topic to the Czech Science Foundation. As a member of this team, I focused on the relationship between beauty and the labour market, social capital and education. During the wtiting of the article “Beauty still matters”, Prof. Mateju passed away. After that, I modified the study under the supervision of the reviewers and added the issue of personal traits to the analysis. In 2017, our research team published a book (in Czech) on the power of beauty and its impact on individual lives, and we are currently preparing with an international research team another book in English on beauty and inequality. Our data from the Czech project from 2015 are still unique for this purpose.

Do you have any video, recorded conference, or online material that you would like us to share with others?

P. Raudenská: No, I have not. However, I use a ResearchGate account extensively: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Petra-Raudenska

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers?

P. Raudenská: I completed my doctoral studies in sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy of Charles University in Prague in 2014. Since 2012 I have been an assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Finance and Administration and at the Faculty of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague, specialising in quantitative data analysis and sociological research methods. From 2013 to 2016 I worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social and Economic Analyses. From 2016 to 2018 I worked as an analytical expert at the National Training Fund. I currently work as a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Department of Social Stratification.

My research interests are comparative research methodology, social and educational inequalities, human capital and human values. In all aspects of social research (well-being, attractiveness, social skills, education, values, social stratification) I focus on the methodological aspect of interviewing and data comparability. I won the prize for the best poster at the ECSR conference in Lausanne (Switzerland 2019) with a poster entitled “The Comparability of the Affective Well-Being Scale”. I am the author of the monograph Comparability of Attitudinal Scales in Comparative Research (2015) and co-editor of the collective monographs The Confrontation of Values in Late Modernity: The Czech Republic and the Hlu?ín Region in the European Context (2016) and Education, skills and mobility: Employment and Labour Market in the Czech Republic (2019). I also participated in several other collective monographs and published my articles in relevant academic journals.

Do you have any twitter account (personal account, university account, colleague account, etc.) that we can include in our posts?

P. Raudenská: @PetraRaudenska