Looking the Part? How Candidates’ Race and Attire Shape Employers’ Hiring Decisions in a Low-Wage Labor Market

Racial disparities in employment persist in the United States, particularly in low-wage labor markets in which employers frequently cite self-presentation, especially attire, as a basis for hiring decisions. Yet, whether improving professional attire yields equal returns across racial groups remains largely unexamined. Drawing on status characteristics theory, we argue that professional attire functions as an ambiguous proxy for unobservable traits such as motivation and reliability, making it susceptible to racialized interpretations. We predict that professional attire will yield weaker hiring returns for Black candidates than for their White counterparts and that perceived professionalism mediates this gap. We test these arguments using data from a gig-staffing platform comprising over 1 million job applications with profile photos, supplemented by a preregistered experiment that manipulates attire within candidates, using two photos of each candidate: one in professional attire, one in casual. The results converge across field and experimental data. Professional attire improves hiring prospects overall but yields substantially smaller returns for Black candidates. Moderated mediation tests confirm that perceived professionalism drives this disparity, such that race discounts how attire translates into perceived professionalism and how perceived professionalism translates into hiring. The racial gap attenuates in customer-facing roles in which appearance is task relevant. These findings challenge supply-side accounts of hiring inequality and reveal how a demand-side interpretation of equivalent signals perpetuates racial disadvantages.