From
Robin Hanson (and his quoted material from other sources):
'Unattractive people are less likely to be hired and promoted, and they earn lower salaries, even in fields in which looks have no obvious relationship to professional duties. . . For lawyers, such prejudice can translate to a pay cut of as much as 12 percent. When researchers ask people to evaluate written essays, the same material receives lower ratings for ideas, style and creativity when an accompanying photograph shows a less attractive author. Good-looking professors get better course evaluations from students; teachers in turn rate good-looking students as more intelligent. . . . In studies that simulate legal proceedings, unattractive plaintiffs receive lower damage awards. [Researchers] gave students case studies involving real criminal defendants and asked them to come to a verdict and a punishment for each. The students gave unattractive defendants prison sentences that were, on average, 22 months longer than those they gave to attractive defendants.'
. . . I despair of finding a way to see our general pattern of which discriminations we allow as an application of some general moral principle. Instead it seems more likely that recent cultural elites preferred to discourage the types of discrimination that favored their cultural competitors, while retaining the types that favored them or their allies. For example, since today’s cultural elites tend to be pretty, they have little interest in preventing discrimination against the ugly.
(Emphasis added by me).