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Aug 17

Keenan: Is your success tied to your testosterone? – Calgary Herald

Testosterone Comments Off on Keenan: Is your success tied to your testosterone? – Calgary Herald

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Over the years, many physical traits have been touted as correlated with male success. Tall guys make more money. Attractive men have a better chance of getting hired. Obese fellows suffer in job interviews.

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That height/income correlation is pretty well documented. University of Florida researcher Timothy Judge and colleagues analyzed data from 8,500 American and British subjects and worked out that someone who is six feet tall earns, on average $166,000 more in a 30-year career than someone who is 5 feet 5 inches. This was true for both genders, though shorter men are slightly more likely to encounter height bias in the workplace than are shorter women.

Likewise, the attractiveness bias, sometimes called lookism, is well established. A 2019 article in the Harvard Business Review noted that it starts early. Attractive applicants score higher in college admissions interviews and earn higher grades when they get to class. The author, business psychology professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, cites the very well-established halo effect whereby attractive people are generally perceived as being more sociable, healthy, successful, honest, and talented.

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He also makes an interesting suggestion for tackling this type of bias artificial intelligence. If programmed correctly, he writes, AI could become an objective way to measure what we dont always see ourselves. The key phrase there is if programmed correctly. So far, many artificial intelligence models simply automate the biases of their creators.

Testosterone certainly appears to predict some kinds of business success. Researchers led by Sean Harrison of the University of Bristol note that among male executives, circulating testosterone has been linked with a number of subordinates and among male financial traders, with daily profits.

It has been suggested that this happens because higher testosterone levels tend to increase a mans tolerance for risk. This, in turn, leads many guys with high testosterone to choose the path of entrepreneurship, with the attendant risks and rewards. Even for those in standard employment situations, a higher testosterone level may affect willingness to engage in assertive wage bargaining.

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Harrison and colleagues dove into a huge biomedical database, the U.K. Biobank, and studied the records of 306,248 men and women. They were seeking to establish a causal relationship between testosterone levels and what they called socioeconomic position (SEP).

One concern here is the direction of causation. Perhaps having a lower SEP causes lower testosterone levels in men. This would make sense because being poor is stressful and, as they note, psychosocial stress associated with socioeconomic adversity could influence testosterone alongside other aspects of health.

One unique contribution of this study is the fact that it used a technique called Mendelian Randomization. Made possible by advances in genetics, this method analyzes single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which are determined at conception and related to a single factor, in this case, testosterone production. This allows the researchers to rule out reverse causation and other confounding effects.

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At the end of the day, they concluded that We found little evidence that testosterone affected socioeconomic position, health, or risk-taking. Were previous studies wrong? Not necessarily, but they may have been clouded by reverse causation or other factors.

Another study, also from the U.K., compared men who grew up in the relatively healthy and wealthy environment of London with those raised in Sylhet, Bangladesh. As the authors note, Men in wealthier countries tend to have higher levels of testosterone than men in poorer countries or places with high rates of infectious disease.

What wasnt clear is when this effect took place. Was it in infancy? Childhood? After puberty? New research by Kesson Magid of Durham University studied men who moved to London at various life stages. The researchers looked at factors like height, age of puberty, and testosterone levels as adults.

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Migration before puberty predicted higher testosterone and an earlier recalled pubertal age compared with Bangladeshi sedentees or adult migrants, with more pronounced differences in men who arrived before the age of eight.

They have an interesting explanation for their results, which is based on the energy cost of various activities. Boys in Bangladesh, where sanitation is poor, spend a lot of their biological resources developing immunity. This comes at the expense of building a strong reproductive function.

As the authors write, We found that the longer a man lived in Bangladesh as a child, the shorter he was as an adult. This suggests that boys growing up in Bangladesh had to trade off growing taller for something else, such as immunity.

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Theres not much you can do about your height or attractiveness unless you are ready for serious plastic surgery. As for tweaking your testosterone levels, experts like urologist Dr. Puneet Masson of the University of Pennsylvania urge caution. He treats men with low testosterone levels who are trying to become fathers. Many times Im taking these guys off of supplements or medications and putting them on something to get their body to make its own testosterone, he notes. The Penn Medicine site also cautions that taking exogenous or external testosterone shuts off other hormones essential for sperm development.

Its worth a mention that these testosterone studies were published both in academic journals and, in a more approachable format, on a free website called theconversation.com/ca. Spending some time reading articles there might have an even stronger correlation with your career success than your height, looks, or testosterone levels.

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Keenan: Is your success tied to your testosterone? - Calgary Herald

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