Testing the relationship between beards and heirarchical seniority :

The survey, which appears today in The Pharmaceutical
Journal, was done by doctoral students Sarah Carter and Kristina Åström
who were inspired by an "impressively hairy" supervisor at the
University of London. "Sixteen members of our 18-strong research group
are female. Would we, and do we, face discrimination?" they asked.
The
answer appears to be yes. While 10.5 per cent of lecturers were
bewhiskered, the figure rose to 13.6 per cent for senior lecturers,
16.7 per cent for readers and 21.4 per cent for professors.

Well, no, they haven’t proved discrimination at all. They’ve proved a correlation between being unshorn and being a professor. One explanation given:

One theory is that being unshorn makes men more likely to be appointed
to professorships, as facial hair is linked with high testosterone and
aggression.

Tsk Tsk. This would mean that John Quiggin, host to an impressive set of whiskers, is a hormone fueled fount of violence, something which he quite rightly notes he is not. Now, as JQ and others in the Crooked Timber crowd have successfuly pointed out in the past I can manage to mangle statistical arguments quite successfully, so I’ll stick with possible alternative explanations of the correlation rather than getting Dsquared all over me again.
(Looking at where John got the story from it’s the same Telegraph story via Michael Froomkin, one of whose commenters points out an alternative, that it is simply to do with declining fashion sense in those who gain tenure.)
There’s two time factors involved.
1) Males do not have a beard or not have a beard for all time. They are things that one can have for a time and then shave, or, shave for a time and then have a beard. I tend to have a beard in winter and not in summer. Transition one way takes a few weeks, the other a boring 45 minutes with a fresh pack of razors.
2) This is supposition, unsupported by any facts, but I would guess that beardedness increases with age. Professors are, usually, older than readers who are older than senior lecturers who are older than lecturers. Perhaps someone who knows the figures for the incidence of facial hair by age group would like to confirm or refute this.

Given the above, what we could say the research has found is that those who are granted tenure (leaving aside the idea that it destroys fashion sense) are more likely to take the decision to stop shaving, in lock-step with their age cohort.

No, I don’t know whether it’s true or not either, only putting it forward as an alternative explanation for the correlation seen. At least I avoided any of the obvious jokes about whether female academics shave or not.