Labor market smiles on women with good teeth
If you’re a female St. Louis native in your mid-40s to early 50s, a new public-health study should put a smile on your face. The working paper by Sherry Glied and Matthew Neidell of Columbia University says that women who grew up in a city with fluoridated water earn about 4 percent more as adults than women who grew up in a non-fluoridated city. St. Louis, the study points out, began fluoridation in 1955, well ahead of latecomers like Kansas City, which waited until 1983.
It’s already well-established that fluoridation leads to better teeth. The authors offer several reasons why better teeth lead to higher wages (I’ve omitted some mathematical symbols from this passage):
Oral health may affect earnings through several channels. Employers with a taste for more attractive workers offer them higher wages. Consumers with a preference to deal with more attractive workers results in higher output and thus higher earnings. If better oral health makes workers more productive by reducing absenteeism or improving self-esteem, then oral health indirectly leads to higher wages.
For some reason, good teeth don’t seem to boost men’s earnings. Basically, the authors say, women seem to be held to a higher standard of beauty:
The higher effect for women is consistent with our hypotheses that 1) women may be more greatly affected by consumer or employer discrimination and 2) that women may be more likely to select into occupations based on their physical appearance.
(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
I gave this post 5 stars not because it is of SUPREME importance, but because it provides some very intelligent insights into the functioning of society that were apparently way beyond the comprehension of the first rate who gave the post just 1 star.
Now, I\’ll confess that I didn\’t yet read the link to the original study referenced in this post, so I don\’t know how effectively it accounted for other factors that could account for women from cities with fluoridation of water supplies having higher incomes. But these are factors that certainly SHOULD be considered:
(1) The voters (and, hence, the governments) of larger cities are more inclined to accept the predominant conclusions of the scientific community, one of which is that fluoridation of water supplies has substantial benefits for dental health and is not a “Communist plot” to emasculate the American population.
(2) People (especially women) in larger cities, on average, have higher incomes than people (especially women) in smaller cities.
In other words, these well-established socio-economic differences between large and small cities may be the REAL reason for differences in women’s incomes, rather than the fluoridation, or lack thereof, of municipal water supplies.