I ran across two very interesting articles addressing being overweight and how it affects your money. Apparently, the bigger you are the less money you make. Especially when it comes to being an overweight Caucasian woman. So, even if you make good money, you’re probably not making what you could if you weighed less. On the contrary, men do not face the same discrimination as women do. The articles also touched on race and marriage stats. Here are a few snippets from the articles, thought I’d share…
“With the base being the average size woman and the salary she got (on average), thin women got about $7,000 more, heavy women got $9,000 less and very heavy women got almost $19,000 less than the base salary.”
“Other times it is a matter of appearances or a belief that “people of size,” as Mr. Roehling terms the obese, are lazy, weak-willed or considered too unattractive to interact with customers.”
“The bias is more pronounced toward white women than white men, Mr. Roehling said: “Blacks are more accepting of large people and whites are more accepting of overweight black females.”
“…test results showed that bias against blacks and the overweight was about equal, but that while people rarely admit to race bias, they freely admit to weight bias. “There is no social sanction against saying you don’t like fat people,” Mr. Nosek said.”
 |
| (c) Brand Old World |
“That heavier people have a harder time getting married is pretty well supported,” said Jeffery Sobal, a professor at Cornell University who has studied obesity. Marriage can be crucial in wealth creation, especially when a person “marries up” to someone with money or a higher education. That may be a rarer occurrence for the obese. “There is a stigma against the overweight that plays out in the social class world,” The end result? The obese accumulate only about half the assets of the normal-size American.
“A chicken-or-egg question invariably pops up. Are people fat because they are poor or poor because they are fat?”
“What happens to a person who loses weight? Mr. Zagorsky said a drastic drop in weight corresponds to an increase in wealth.”
So, what do you think about this?
View full articles here:
(c) New York Times
(c) Lovely Ish
Much love,
@lacenleopard
Wow! So sad yet so true.
ReplyDeletetragic but it is most definitely true......
ReplyDeleteI agree...
DeleteNot cool...
ReplyDeleteAt all...
DeleteThat is ridiculous..so either way it's a lose lose.
ReplyDeleteYep. Unless you lose a significant amount of weight, smh.
DeleteSeriously it is. I understand presenting yourself well...but you can do that at any size in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteThank you much hunn!
ReplyDeleteHog wash, but unfortunately bias like this still occurs. Darn if ya do, darn if ya don't.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I definitely think that at times in certain industries there can be weight bias in the hiring process. But I do question the study. Are they comparing people with in the same job fields? there are lots of variables that may have a correlating effect, but that of course is not a causation by any means. The NYT article also seemed to be based upon a lot of erroneous details-thinner people tend to receive larger inheritance possibly because they and their family members live longer and have longer to accumulate wealth. That really sounds like an incredibly far stretch to come to a conclusion to without any empirical data to back it up. Not to mention that it does nothing to consider people that begin in poverty, the factor of food deserts that contribute to being over-weight and that upward mobility is becoming an impossible goal for many, that can attribute to being overweight and lower economic levels.
ReplyDelete