Image Description: An illustration showing elements representing weight, diet and appearance including a scale, running sneakers, lipstick, tea, an eyeshadow palette, a purse, and hand weights.

Combatting Weight and Appearance Bias I: The effects of discrimination in the workplace

Disclaimer: In this post, I’ll be using the term “fat.” Fat is a neutral descriptor, similar to tall or short; it’s the stigma we attach to the word that is harmful. Fat individuals have reclaimed the word, similar to how LGBTQIA+ individuals have reclaimed the word “queer.” While fat is something people should be able to choose to identify as, rather than be labelled as, for the purpose of this discussion I use the term generally to refer to people in the “overweight,” “obese,” and “very obese” BMI bands. I understand that BMI is a problematic tool for categorization, but it’s one of the most commonly used metrics in studies on this topic.

I am queer, White, and thin. As such, I benefit from a lot of privilege. I don’t pretend to speak to the experiences of fat individuals but instead hope to share academic and community knowledge and start a conversation.

In our internal Diversity & Inclusivity workshops, we’ve highlighted the different ways discrimination manifests in the workplace and what we can do to combat and take responsibility for our own biases. Often this discrimination is unconscious; we don’t even know we’re doing it, because societal belief systems like racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity and ageism are learned and internalized from such an early age.

Most of the forms of bias we have discussed to date are covered under equal opportunity laws. However, not every form of potential discrimination is. One of the most common yet unprotected and under-discussed forms of bias that can effect potential and current employees is a person’s weight, appearance, and “attractiveness.”

D&I initiatives can and should move beyond the law by creating new, far-reaching definitions of acceptable and unacceptable behavior and putting corresponding policies into action. So it is necessary for us to explore issues like size and appearance biases.

This is the first post in a series of three I have planned for the coming weeks discussing these issues. In this post, I will discuss the ways that these forms of discrimination currently effect individuals in the workforce. Future posts will discuss how we can change our perceptions of the intersections between weight, size, and health and what changes we can make as individuals and as a company to combat these biases in the immediate future.

Diet culture & the tech industry

Not only is weight and appearance discrimination legal, but in many ways it is socially acceptable (39). We live in a world obsessed with “diet culture.” When most people hear the word “diet” they think of weight loss. That’s a large part of what diet culture entails; it convinces us our bodies should be smaller. It also associates food with morality by assigning “goodness” to certain lifestyles and choices.

Think about the different messages you get about food.

Often you associate foods with being “good” or “bad.” Kale salad, good. Ice cream, bad. Organic, good. Refined sugar, bad. And so on. We prize restriction, excessive exercise, and anything considered to be a form of “self-control.” Between food, physical activity, and lifestyle choices, diet culture quantifies our moral worth.

The tech industry is a direct participant in diet culture. We adopt a variety of products and beliefs for the sake of efficiency and functionality, some of which promote unhealthy behaviors. Fitness trackers like Fitbit count your steps and incentivize excessive exercise by comparing you to your peers; Soylent is a popular “meal replacement” created to increase efficiency by removing the “time waste” of eating; the gig economy and the tech products that facilitate it actively celebrate working yourself to death, glorifying cups of coffee over hours of sleep.

The same way we all internalize racism, classism, ableism, heteronormativity, and ageism, we also internalize diet culture (4, 5). Fed by diet culture, weight and appearance discrimination targets bodies that fall outside of “the norm”, which I will define below. The effects of this internalization are so profound and largely uncontested that one study found that weight-based employment discrimination is more prevalent than discrimination based on religion, disability, or sexual orientation (1), which have received much more attention and legislative action.

Image Description: An illustration showing sunglasses, a phone, and a pile of magazines. The magazine on the top has an illustration of a thin, long haired, fair-skinned woman in a bathing suit with “Flat Abs!” and “Hot & Happy” as headlines.

Attractiveness & women’s bodies

Think for a moment about what you consider “attractive.”

Despite popular belief, evidence shows most people in a given culture have largely similar definitions of “attractiveness.” This is because, to a large extent, what is considered “attractive” is determined by the dominant group in a society (11). In the US and Canada, dominant groups include White, wealthy, educated, cisgender, heterosexual, non-disabled, and thin people. These individuals become the template for what is attractive in our society (27). Even those outside of dominant groups internalize these standards; a study of US college students, including individuals from many races, discovered that all participants rated Whites as the “most attractive” group.

Between movies, tv, ads, publications, and social media we are constantly subjected to these, for many, unattainable standards of beauty. On top of countless photoshopped images, we are bombarded with thousands of products to help fix our “imperfections,” reinforcing this dominant normative standard of beauty (28).

Women in particular are disproportionately affected by this ideal and face an inordinate amount of pressure to be thin (44). For example, a study revealed that women’s magazines contained 10.5 times as many diet promotions as men’s magazines (28). It’s no wonder more women than men end up unhappy with their normal, healthy bodies (as I will discuss in a later post, weight has limited relevance to health) and thus turn to actions such as restrictive dieting and eating disorders (13). Some studies have shown that up to 20 percent of women suffer from an eating disorder. Another found that 40 percent of women showed “anorexic-like” behavior; nearly 50 percent engaged in bingeing and purging. (44) By comparison, other studies indicate that men are only one-fourth as likely to suffer from an eating disorder and half as likely to show “anorexic-like” behavior as women.

Weight discrimination is often equivalent to sexism

Fat women are targets of weight discrimination in nearly all areas of life, including interpersonal relationships, education, employment, and health care (6, 7, 8, 9, 39). In the workplace, fat women are more adversely impacted by weight discrimination than men. They are less likely to be hired or considered for leadership positions (2) and tend to be offered fewer promotion opportunities and desirable job assignments (37, 43). Fat female job applicants are assessed more negatively in terms of reliability, dependability, honesty, ability to inspire, among other factors, than their peers (16).

Fat women also earn significantly less than their non-fat peers. Fatness is associated with up to a 17.51 percent wage decease; that is roughly equivalent to the wage differential for 2 years of education or 3 years of prior work experience (16).

There is some evidence of bias against fat men in the workplace. However, it is limited to men with especially high BMIs, and even then only occurs sporadically. This clearly points to an inequity in the way we treat weight in men and women.

Image Description: An illustration showing different elements representing appearance, such as a makeup palette, perfume, lipstick, a button up shirt, and a mirror.

Appearance discrimination effects everyone

Society teaches us to associate normative attractiveness — which includes weight but also many other factors such as complexion, features, and attire — with happiness and success. (Again, “attractiveness” accords culturally with the image of dominant social classes.) Regardless of gender, “attractive” individuals are generally viewed as being more intelligent, likable, honest, and sensitive than their peers (26, 27). They are more likely to be hired, better placed, compensated (23, 25) and evaluated (24), and be selected for management training and promotions then less “attractive” peers (38, 40, 41, 42, 43).

Appearance discrimination does skew towards women. They face many of the same appearance biases as their male peers, but to a more extreme degree and with less clarity. For example, both men and women may be held to a dress code. But beyond that dress code women are often implicitly expected to wear makeup and more feminine clothing (e.g. dresses, skirts, heels, jewelry). Because these expectations are not explicit, it is hard to control them with policy changes, such as eliminating that dress code. As a result, while both men and women are more likely to be hired if they wear more apparently expensive clothes and conform to their gender norms, it can be more difficult for women to meet these norms (27). In other words, a woman who dresses in a way that signals affluence but doesn’t wear makeup may still be seen as less competent at her job.

Take a moment to consider how these biases affects not only women, but trans and non-binary individuals as well. If a person does not conform to gender norms from the start, or may not appear to a colleague as in line with the gender they identify with, then they are far more likely to suffer from the negative consequences associated with these normative expectations.

Clearly, weight and appearance discrimination exist in the workplace. Not only that, but these biases are incredibly prevalent and have profound negative effects on people’s lives and careers. This type of discrimination warrants discussion in the same way the tech industry now discusses other forms of workplace discrimination.

The prevalence and level of effect of these biases are especially disconcerting because most of the assumptions that diet culture and our popular perceptions of health are built upon are false. We will discuss this in next week’s post.

Have you experienced weight or appearance discrimination? How does diet culture relate to your personal and professional life? Does your company have a policy prohibiting weight and appearance discrimination? We’d love to hear from you on Twitter, or you can email us.

✌️ Versett is a product design and engineering studio. If you like this post, you’d love working with us. See where you’d fit in at https://versett.com/

Sources

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