The Weight Penalty

I've hardly come across a woman who has never heard comments about her weight at any point in her life. Everyone's experiences are personal but the the point at issue is universal. With the rise of social media, we get to come across body positivity, but sizeism is still deeply rooted in the system. Now this is not another conversation on body positivity. This discussion is about how body image can affect a woman's professional life. From “the social x-ray” in the 1980s in New York, the “heroin chic” in London in the 1990s to the “weasel bod” today, we as a society have not really changed as much as it seems. Pursuit of such bodies might permit a little more food today than the regimes of the past, but it is just as difficult to attain. Search models who reveal secrets about the modelling industry and they will tell you that it is still not inclusive. All women eventually realise the importance that society puts on their bodies. It's like a jungle where the trees are the obstacles you have to fight to defend your body and eventually you realise that the jungle is really deep. Cutting a few trees will only reveal how many more are there . RIP to the thinking that clever and ambitious women, who can measure their worth in the labour market on the basis of their intelligence or education, need not pay attention to their figure. Examination into the subject shows how weight interacts with their wages or income which differs from country to country. In poor countries, rich people are heavier than poor people. In rich countries, poor people are heavier than rich people. A simple logic is given for this conjecture. Rich people in poor countries can afford a great amount of food while the poor cannot, while rich people in rich countries are aware about how to maintain a healthy weight. Poor people may struggle to afford healthy foods. They may reach for processed or fast foods because they lack the time to prepare meals at home or have less time to exercise because low wage jobs often involve working long shifts and can be less flexible. The problem here is that the correlation between income and weight at the population level in advanced countries is driven almost entirely by women. In America and Italy, income in relation to obesity is a much more downward slope for women than men. Infact, the slope for men is flat.

Richer countries like France have a very steep downward slope for women but a gentler slope for men. To sum up, rich women are thinner than poor women, but poor men are as fat as rich men. Now pause for a moment and think, If money really influenced weight, then why is the effect more deep-seated for women and only mildly for men? Even after considering physiology and work type, the statistics don't fit right. Like one study by the American Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) found that only 3.5% of civilians are employed in jobs requiring intense physical activity. Only 0.1% of workers are employed in jobs such as acting, which requires one to look a certain way. So why is the pattern so consistent. Numerous studies have shown that overweight or obese women are paid significantly less than their thinner counterparts, whereas no such dynamics exists for men. Although Sweden took an exception, but it's not true in many places where similar studies were conducted (eg. America, Britain, Canada and Denmark). The penalty for an obese woman costs her 10% of the income in her lifetime and we can definitely assume that this number is far from reality. It neglects the number of women who did not get the job because of being obese, let alone the low pay. It is to the extent that getting a higher degree would require more effort (relatively) than losing some kilos. Getting a degree can cost 18% more, which is only 1.8 times of losing some weight and getting the job. Discrimination against fat women has not decreased, even though their numbers have risen. In fact, it has only grown. Let us see what David Lempert, an economist in the BLS has to say. “We might expect a declining penalty due to the increase in the percentage of overweight individuals”. But he reasons that the discrimination might be increasing because - “the increasing rarity of thinness has led to its rising premium.” His paper is full of infuriating sentences and conclusions like these. He goes on and explains why aged obese women suffer even more. Employers often have to take care of health insurance for their employees. As overweight people tend to have more health complications costing the company more, they avoid hiring them. But if this is the case, then again, why is this pattern not consistent with men. An “implicit bias” study was conducted by Harvard University in which test-takers had to mark people either good or bad. Positive results were shown indicating there was less racial discrimination and sexism. Negative trends towards the LGBTQ+ community has also declined, but this was not the case with ‘weight’. Some women still think that the glossy magazine cover girls are unedited and their bodies are attainable. Not even attaining a healthy body weight, sometimes literally looking like an athlete or a supermodel can be so pressurising that we may completely lose control over our bodies. Employers must also keep up and get regular reality checks. Some might say that it is not wrong to advise someone to lose a little bit of weight, after all, it is for their own health benefit. But this relies on a wobbly pillar of logic. People’s weight really is within their control. It is physically as well as mentally really hard to change your body and we never know who is fighting demons behind the scene. Maybe they want to change but simply cannot in the moment. Society has changed and has accepted many differences, but the economic reality has not really changed. PS: I am not promoting obesity or being overweight or saying that it is okay to be a certain size. In fact, being healthy should be someone’s first priority. But these behaviours in the market can lower someone's self esteem and cost them their mental health. With the rise of social media occurs two things, awareness (and hence acceptability) but it also creates polarisation of thoughts. Many people are still oblivious about the reality of social media.