Have Tattoos? Well … Study Says: Lower Your Professional Expectations
8th October 2017
And rightly so.
Have a tattoo? If the answer is “yes,” it’s more likely you’re unemployed or completely out of the labor force. On average, your income is lower. You’re more probably a smoker, use illegal drugs, engage in risky sexual behavior, have been a victim of crime, and have been incarcerated for committing crime yourself.
People – both males and females – with tats are less educated, have lower grade point averages, have limited vocabularies, suffer depression more frequently, are not as well groomed and – in the case of females – not as good looking.
All of this is detailed in two studies (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and the Australian Study of Health and Relationships) which collected information on tattoos. Unfortunately, the studies only included a yes or no question regarding having one or more tattoos, and didn’t differentiate between having one discrete tattoo from being covered from head to foot with tattoos glorifying demons, racism, sexism, violence, hatred and so forth.
But, the important question is, do people become losers because they get inked, or do they get inked because they’re losers. Which came first? The tattoo or being a loser?
October 10th, 2017 at 11:43
Anyone old enough to get a tattoo legally is old enough to know what happens when you look at pictures of people from ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years ago: you laugh at the clothing, hair styles, makeup, even the frames on people’s eyeglasses, because they’re all hopelessly out of date. But none of those things is permanent, and all can be changed easily. Only someone lacking in common sense would choose to make fashion statements that can’t be undone when the fashions change.
It’s no wonder that many employers don’t want to hire people with tattoos and/or body piercings; if people can’t exercise good judgment when it comes to their own bodies, you can’t trust them to exercise good judgment anywhere else.
October 11th, 2017 at 13:07
You missed this part:
“Examining both labor force participation and earnings, they find that the contribution of being tattooed becomes statistically insignificant when background variables are included in multi-variate analysis.”
October 12th, 2017 at 04:15
Suggesting that the sort of people who get tattoos are the sort of people who won’t get or hold good jobs anyway because of various personality defects. So getting tattoos is a symptom, not a cause. I can believe that.