AUTOGRAPHS

Why Wearing Glasses May Make You More Employable

A recent study by the London based College of Optometrists has revealed that people’s positive prejudices may have an effect on your job prospects. All you have to do to impress your intelligence on 43% of the adults they surveyed, is to put on a pair of designer glasses. 36% also believed that glasses were a strong contributor to a ‘professional look’. Would a potential employer pass you over for a glasses wearing employee? The true implication of this clipboard in street survey is open for debate. But with these kinds of views held in the general population of the UK at a time when jobs are scarce and highly contested, it’s certainly food for thought.

One assumption in the media coverage of this survey deserves questioning. Are negative stereotypes of Mens and Ladies glasses wearers truly gone from the public sphere? Of course, the College of Optometrists issues these surveys with the view of improving things in their industry. People recall the ‘old stereotypes’ of glasses wearing as if these have changed, as opposed to the change being entirely within themselves. Adults have their own expectations of what people who wear glasses are, and the negative connotations they remember are still there in the childhoods of today’s youth. The worst time to be intelligent is, ironically, school. In school, you glasses stop you socialising. In employment, ‘nerds’ are valued. It’s really rather obvious, but apparently, due to the tendency of the media to hype every positive sign of spectacle acceptance as a triumph, it’s completely necessary to make this point. For anyone who isn’t painfully average, School is often a place of great discomfort. Once an intelligent person is free of its confines, they’ll realise that tables turn very quickly. The fashion imperative of glasses wearing is also something that simply doesn’t matter when your hair is in pigtails and your mother picks out all your clothes.

Forgive me then, for being incredibly irritated by the CoO claim that 40% of British people would wear glasses for the sake of the frames alone, under the pretence that this would somehow make them more employable. It should be too worrying though. After all, a similar percentage of people would probably think nothing of fabricating experience on their CV, another lie about as easy to cope with as wearing sunglasses Corey Hart style.

Corey Hart – Sunglasses At Night