My experience of working in very photogenic operations center type rooms is that photographers do not find the actual users as photogenic as the architecture of the room, so for picture days, we would be shoved to one side as they marched in hordes of very young, very attractive, carefully groomed, extremely well dressed professional models, 50:50 male and female and the usual very close attention to marketing-style perfect racial distribution, etc. Believe it or not they also sometimes do this for important clients touring the facility. And this is all very expensive, so they may not want to drop the dough on professional models.

That's terrible. What will this to morale of people already working there? I know most folks are infatuated with appearances, but surely actual productivity and output should trump employees who "look good".

That's unfortunate. Of course, the ideal is a well distributed gender ratio, but real people look...real. And it's usually pretty obvious when this sort of "whitewashing" is happening.