For Women, Your Fat Determines What You Earn – Not Your Brains

I have lifted this verbatum from Businessinsider.com:

Overweight women make $13,847 less than average, while underweight women make $15,572 more. That means that a fat woman makes $29,419 less per year than a skinny one.

A study led by Timothy Judge at the University of Florida and published by the American Psychological Association studied the salaries of nearly 25,000 U.S. men and women. He found that women who were 25 lbs heavier than average make much less a year, while women who were lighter made more.

The pay discrepancy is telling because it reveals employers’ inaccurate assumptions about overweight workers, especially women. According to the study:

“Even though these stereotypes are inaccurate it appears that in the United States, obese employees are viewed by their employers as lazy and lacking in self-discipline…overweight women are consistently judged more harshly in the workplace than overweight men,”

The rewards for underweight women are staggering, according to the study:

This means that, all else equal, a woman who is average weight earns $389,300 less across a 25-year career than a woman who is 25 lbs below average weight.

For men, being heavier can actually pay. Scrawny guys made about $8,000 less than average, while peak earners weighed 207 pounds.

While I have been thinking that health should always come before the number on a scale, one conclusion that can be drawn from the above is that: in business, being thin pays. It’s economics. Another reason it’s called ‘the dismal science’.

There is something fundamentally wrong with our culture of thinness. There’s a big difference between someone wanting to fit into a dress, and someone facing actual discrimination their entire lifetime. Fat people – and especially fat women as evidenced by this –  are about the only people left that can be held up to ridicule and discriminated against in America – and I guess Americans need to look down on some group in order to feel better about their own inadequacies.