Staying in shape may not only benefit your health- it could also affect your paycheck, says a new study. Research by Vanderbilt University has found that being overweight is linked to lower-paying, more-strenous jobs.
The study concluded that women who were classified as obese were more likely to be in jobs that had lower pay, and in less-visible areas of the U.S. workforce, as compared to American men and women of average sizes.
The researchers noted that there is indeed a clear line drawn when a woman "becomes overweight". For one thing, she has less chances of landing job that involves facing the public.
Additionally, the study discovered that women who fell into the "obese" category based on body mass index (BMI) were more likely to work in cheapets-paying, extremely labor-intensive jobs in industries such as food prep, child care, and home health, said Jennifer Shinall. Shinall ithe the author opff the study and an assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School.
Shinall concludes that the data implies that employers are not so gung-ho about hiring heavier women to be "the face of their company. But morbidly obese men don't seem to be underrepresented in these personal-interction jobs, nor do they seem to be over-represented in physical-activity jobs," she point out.
For Shinall, this is essentially a sexual discrimination issue.
Furthermore, Shinall examined federal employment and health data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, then matchged the data against an America eating habits national survey and a breakdown of the U.S. workforce.The discrimination against overweight individuals is rampant in the workforce. "You can fire a fat person for no other reason other than they are fat, and you don't want a fat employee," said Joanne Ikeda, nutritionist emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Only cities like San Francisco and New York have ordinances protecting overweight citizens' civil rights.
