Guess How Much Overweight Women Are Underpaid
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It’s hardly news at this point to say that women are paid less than men in the workplace – that’s well documented. What’s less known is that overweight women have it even worse when it comes to earning a decent salary. A new study concludes that obese women end up taking home an average of $9,000 less per year than women who are comparable in every way except for their weight.
As it turns out, the larger the number on the scale, the lower the number on the paycheck. While overweight women have lower salaries, compensation drops even further for obese women. The heaviest women tend to bring home $19,000 less annually.
Jennifer Shinall, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, conducted this research and was surprised to see just how little weight was required to make the difference in being stiffed on a paycheck. Being only 13 pounds overweight was enough to put women in that category of getting discriminated against financially. Ask dieters, and they’ll tell you those last ten pounds are often the hardest to shed – imagine that being the reason that you’re missing out on nearly $10,000 a year.
It just goes to show how much a woman’s appearance is taken into account even when it shouldn’t be relevant. Because of the biases many people hold, unconscious or otherwise, bosses tend to devalue the contributions of larger women, regardless of their actual competency at the job. As a result, heavier women are not only paid less, but hired and promoted less, too.
Although some might assume that this wage discrepancy is a weight issue rather than a gender one, they go hand in hand. While it’s true that overweight men also earn less than their skinnier counterparts, the salary gap is not nearly as pronounced. Actually, women who are just moderately overweight still earn less than men who are significantly obese. After all, men just aren’t judged for having a gut quite as harshly as women are.
It raises the question – do extremely slender women earn more as a result of their slighter frames? The study also accounted for this variable, and found that the thinnest women actually make $22,000 more than women of average weight (and therefore roughly $40,000 more than the heaviest women.) In essence, businesses are indirectly rewarding women for meeting standards of beauty that aren’t realistic for most women to attain.
Notably, that same financial perk was not found for underweight men. That disparity probably reflects the fact that society doesn’t consider being rail-thin to be as desirable in men as it is for women.
One last surprise that the study uncovered is that overweight women don’t shy away from physical labor. While some might guess that women aren’t paid as much because they can’t do strenuous tasks, actually, the heavier a woman is, the more likely she is to be in a physically demanding occupation. Alas, those careers don’t pay as well, leaving these larger women even further behind financially.
Considering that women are still lobbying for equal pay in general, addressing the prevalent rate of size discrimination against working women isn’t likely to become a mainstream priority any time soon. That’s unfortunate, to say the least, as it will mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages over a lifetime.
