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Leveraging Genomic Data to Document Within-Race Attractiveness Penalties Among Black Americans

By on July 7, 2026 in Articles

Beza Taddess, Luyin Zhang, Sam Trejo

Sociological Science July 7, 2026
10.15195/v13.a31

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In recent years, scholars of racial inequality have increasingly sought to move beyond simply quantifying discrete racial disparities and instead measure social stratification as a function of continuous racialized characteristics that vary both within and between racial groups. In this article, we draw on a sample of genotyped respondents from the Add Health study and construct genetic similarity proportions, individual-level measures that correlate with racialized physical features that vary across the expansive family tree of humanity (skin tone, facial structure, hair texture, etc.). We then investigate the relationship between these proportions and interviewer-rated physical attractiveness among self-identified Black Americans (N=2,087). Our findings highlight the existence of substantial attractiveness penalties related to having higher levels of Sub-Saharan African (as opposed to European) genetic similarity.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Beza Taddess: Department of Sociology, Princeton University. E-mail: bt7304@princeton.edu
Luyin Zhang: Office of Population Research, Princeton University. E-mail: luyin.zhang@princeton.edu
Sam Trejo: Department of Sociology and Office of Population Research, Princeton University. E-mail: samtrejo@princeton.edu

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Dalton Conley, Filiz Garip, Iain Mathieson, Ellis Monk, and Marissa Thompson for helpful comments. This research uses data from Add Health, funded by grant P01 HD31921 (Harris) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer and funded by the National Institute on Aging cooperative agreements U01 AG071448 (Hummer) and U01AG071450 (Hummer and Aiello) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. No direct support was received from grant P01 HD31921 for this analysis. Information on obtaining Add Health data is available on the project website. Send correspondence to Sam Trejo, samtrejo@princeton.edu.

Significance Statement: This study provides new evidence on how racialized physical features shape social experiences within a single self-identified racial group. By using genetic similarity proportions—genetic ancestry measures that correlate with physical traits such as skin tone and facial structure—the authors show that Black Americans with higher levels of Sub-Saharan African genetic similarity are systematically rated as less physically attractive. These results reveal a form of racialized disadvantage that operates within racial categories and is not captured by typical survey measures and help explain why traditional surveys report relatively small Black–White attractiveness gaps (whereas real-world behavior shows much larger differences). More broadly, the study offers genetic similarity proportions as a new tool for exploring processes of racialization in contemporary society.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All results needed to evaluate the conclusions in the article are present in the article and/or the Supplementary Materials. All syntax files needed to replicate our main text analyses are available at the following link: https://github.com/luyin-z/attractiveness_penalties. We utilized the restricted Add Health survey and genotype data, which can be accessed by researchers via application at https://data.cpc.unc.edu/projects/2/view.


  • Citation: Taddess, Beza, Luyin Zhang, and Sam Trejo. 2026. “Leveraging Genomic Data to Document Within-Race Attractiveness Penalties Among Black Americans” Sociological Science 13: 802-824.
  • Received: March 24, 2026
  • Accepted: May 13, 2026
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Ellis Monk
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a31


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Fathers’ Military Service and Children’s College Attainment

By on April 20, 2026 in Articles

Paula Fomby, Patricia van Hissenhoven Flórez

Sociological Science April 20, 2026
10.15195/v13.a18

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Men’s early adult experiences shape the life chances of their future children. For Black men in the United States, systemic exclusion from educational and labor market opportunity has long constrained intergenerational mobility. We examine whether military service alters this trajectory, drawing on the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1968–2023, N=7,808 father–child pairs) to investigate college completion among adult children whose fathers were born between 1920 and 1976. Since the mid-twentieth century, the Armed Forces have offered Black men racial integration, occupational advancement, economic stability, and educational benefits that were less available in civilian society. Black fathers’ military service increased children’s probability of earning a bachelor’s degree by 53 percent compared with children of Black nonveterans, with larger differences when fathers served before the transition to an all-volunteer force. Gains were attributable to GI Bill benefit receipt and diversion out of limited civilian opportunity in early adulthood. White fathers’ veteran status conferred no educational advantage to their children, reflecting different counterfactuals: service provided greater relative benefits when the alternative was a racially closed civilian opportunity structure rather than an open one.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.


Paula Fomby, University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: pfomby@sas.upenn.edu.

Patricia van Hissenhoven Flórez, University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: vpatr@sas.upenn.edu.

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to Angela Dixon, Megan Reed, Christine Schwartz, and participants in seminars at Emory University, University of Maryland, and University of Wisconsin for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript and to the University of Pennsylvania Population Studies Center and its NICHD Center Grant (P2C HD044964) for administrative and computing support. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors.


Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Reproducibility package available at: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/sites/psid/view/studies/303003


  • Citation: Fomby, Paula, Patricia van Hissenhoven Flórez. 2026. “Fathers’ Military Service and Children’s College Attainment” Sociological Science 13: 441-475.
  • Received: January 6, 2026
  • Accepted: March 9, 2026
  • Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Ellis Monk
  • DOI: 10.15195/v13.a18


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The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances

By on December 1, 2020 in Articles

David Brady, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, Joscha Legewie

Sociological Science December 1, 2020
10.15195/v7.a25

Abstract
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Vast racial inequalities continue to prevail across the United States and are closely linked to economic resources. One particularly prominent argument contends that childhood wealth accounts for black–white (BW) disadvantages in life chances. This article analyzes how much childhood wealth and childhood income mediate BW disadvantages in adult life chances with Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Cross-National Equivalent File data on children from the 1980s and 1990s who were 30+ years old in 2015. Compared with previous research, we exploit longer panel data, more comprehensively assess adult life chances with 18 outcomes, and measure income and wealth more rigorously. We find large BW disadvantages in most outcomes. Childhood wealth and income mediate a substantial share of most BW disadvantages, although there are several significant BW disadvantages even after adjusting for childhood wealth and income. The evidence mostly contradicts the prominent claim that childhood wealth is more important than childhood income. Indeed, the analyses mostly show that childhood income explains more of BW disadvantages and has larger standardized coefficients than childhood wealth. We also show how limitations in prior wealth research explain why our conclusions differ. Replication with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and a variety of robustness checks support these conclusions.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

David Brady: School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside, and WZB Berlin Social Science Center
E-mail: dbrady@ucr.edu

Ryan Finnigan: Department of Sociology, University of California, Davis
E-mail: rfinnigan@ucdavis.edu

Ulrich Kohler: Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Potsdam
E-mail: ukohler@uni-potsdam.de

Joscha Legewie: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: jlegewie@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgments: Direct correspondence to David Brady, School of Public Policy, University of California, INTS 4133, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA 92521; email:dbrady@ucr.edu. The last three authors are listed alphabetically and contributed equally. This article benefitted from presentations at the New York University–Abu Dhabi Social Research and Public Policy seminar; University of California, Santa Barbara, Broom Center for Demography; the PAA meetings; the University of California Riverside Applied/Development Economics Brown Bag; theWorking Groups on Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility and Movements, Organizations, and Markets in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles; and the WZBUSP Writing Workshop. We appreciate suggestions from Sociological Science reviewers and editor Jesper Sorensen, Thomas Biegert, Agnes Blome, Irene Boeckmann, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Tyson Brown, Mareike Buenning, Rich Carpiano, Joe Cummins, Chenoa Flippen, Sanjiv Gupta, Martin Hällsten, Lena Hipp, Sabine Huebgen, Bob Kaestner, Sasha Killewald, Nadia Kim, Matthew Mahutga, Fabian Pfeffer, Emanuela Struffolino, Florencia Torche, Zachary Van Winkle, Andres Villarreal, and Hanna Zagel.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Brady, David, Ryan Finnigan, Ulrich Kohler, and Joscha Legewie. 2020. “The Inheritance of Race Revisited: Childhood Wealth and Income and Black–White Disadvantages in Adult Life Chances.” Sociological Science 7: 599-627.
  • Received: August 7, 2020
  • Accepted: September 24, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a25


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