New research shows that having more testosterone makes you less likely to be unemployed and gives you a better chance of getting a job. The findings, which were published in the journal Economics and Human Biology, imply that testosterone levels in men are linked to behaviors and cognitive processes that affect labor market transitions.

Research co-author Peter Eibich and colleagues “were interested in how biological markers (such as testosterone levels) relate to social and economic outcomes”.

According to him, “Data on such biomarkers are now frequently collected as part of large social science household surveys, such as the UK Household Longitudinal Study, which we used in our research project.”

“Yet,” the co-author adds “our understanding of how these biological processes are related to social and economic behavior is currently still limited (at least for most of the biomarkers available).”

Testosterone is an especially fascinating case because earlier research has shown that testosterone levels are linked to specific personality factors and individual behavior. In the past, these personality traits and behaviors were associated to success in the workforce.

“At the same time, the evidence on the health consequences of high or low testosterone levels is somewhat inconclusive. As such, testosterone is an example for a biological process that might influence economic behavior without necessarily relating to health or disability,” the researcher adds.

Since its inception in 2009, the UK Household Longitudinal Study has collected data from over 40,000 households in the United Kingdom. There are now nine rounds of data in the study. In each wave, the participants were asked about their current employment position. Over 20,000 adult participants’ bio-medical data, including testosterone levels, were obtained by nurses five months after they completed Wave 2 or Wave 3 of the study.

Eibich and his colleagues reviewed data from 2,115 males aged 25 to 64 who specified being employed or jobless (but not self-employed) during the nurse visit to look into the link between testosterone and labor market transitions.

The researchers discovered that unemployed men with medium and high testosterone levels were considerably more likely to report employment during the succeeding wave compared to those with low testosterone levels. This was true even after genetic variation was taken into account.

The findings of the study “suggest that British men with higher testosterone levels are less likely to become unemployed, and they are less likely to remain in unemployment if they are out of work,” Eibich told PsyPost.

This is probably related to the fact that testosterone causes variances in personality traits as well as behavior.

“For example, we find that men with higher testosterone levels are more confident and reported that they were more likely to use the internet for their job search,” he adds.

The new study, like all research, has significant limitations.

“An important caveat is that the data used for our research only includes testosterone measured at a single point in time,” Eibich says. “We compensate for this to some extent by using genetic data to isolate variation in testosterone levels that is caused by differences in genetic expressions (and thus constant across the life course). However, further research using data on multiple measurements of testosterone levels for the same individuals would be helpful to gain a sense of how much testosterone levels fluctuate over time for one person .”

“It would also be very interesting to look at the consequences for women,” he adds.

“Our study only included men, because the testosterone levels of most women were below the detectable threshold.”

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