Life is hard for beautiful men, at least in the professional world. According to a new small study from University College London and the University of Maryland, good looks can be detrimental for men in the work place and make it harder for them to get a job in a competitive work setting.

For the study, researchers devised four experiments in which volunteers were asked to “hire candidates” of various levels of attraction. Results showed that overall being slightly unattractive seemed to be advantageous for male candidates, Fusion reported. This was especially true in competitive environments, such as car dealerships, where employees were rewarded based on individual success.

“In situations where there are subtle or less subtle cues of competition among colleagues, then the fact that attractive men are seen as more competent is going to create a disadvantage for attractive men,” Marko Pitesa, one of the researchers involved in the study, told Fusion.

The reasoning for this, however, is not because handsome men are perceived as less competent, but rather that they are subconsciously perceived as too much of a threat.

“People make these important job decisions and inferences about how competent people are just based on their physical attractiveness without having the slightest clue that they’re doing that,” Pitesa added.

Pitesa and his team hope that the study will raise awareness about when and how stereotyping occurs in order to take the correct steps to stop it, the press release reported.

Feeling intimidated by attractive men may be rooted in our natural inclination to view handsome men as more selfish and competitive. A recent study from Brunel University in England found that the more attractive the man, the more both female and male volunteers believed him to be selfish and competitive.

With that being said, it seems that incredibly attractive men have adapted to this unspoken bias in the workplace, because according to Fusion, handsome men are more likely to successfully close a big deal and on average earn more money than their less attractive counterparts.

For a woman, however, being attractive may actually help you get a job. As reported by Business Insider, overall, attractive women get significantly more callbacks than women found less attractive. In an Italian study, researchers sent out 10,000 resumes changing only the name, address, and photo, to test out employers’ biases. Results showed that the average callback rate was 30 percent across all of the resumes, but for attractive women the callback rate was 54 percent. The callback rate for unattractive women was only seven percent.

Source: Lee S, Pitesea M, Pillutla M, Thau S. When beauty helps and when it hurts: An organizational context model of attractiveness discrimination in selection decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 2015.