Punishing employees because of their size sends a dangerous and misleading message.
It’s 2023, but weight-based discrimination remains a living, breathing parasite within the American workforce.
A scant list of places within the U.S. implemented legislation in recent years to protect people from workplace weight bias. New York City, for example, recently announced that this spring, it will be illegal for companies not to hire someone because of their weight, the New York Times reported. In doing so, it will join Michigan, Washington, Washington, D.C. and Madison, Wis. as the few states and districts to prohibit weight discrimination.
However, the United States has no federal policy to prevent companies from firing people for being overweight.
It is extremely problematic for a host of reasons that the stability of one’s career is contingent on their size. For one, the BMI scale used to measure obesity is inherently flawed, the New York Times reported.
In the 1830s, Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, a mathematician and astronomer, devised the test as a quick method of determining obesity. The test worked by dividing one’s weight in kilograms by their height in meters. A score of 18.5 equates to being underweight, a score between 18.5 and 24.9 is “normal,” and anything above 30 equates to obesity.
However, Quetelet only studied white European men, so the test never accounted for the makeup of other populations. It doesn’t account for muscle mass or bone density, so it underestimates Asian Americans and overcompensates Black Americans, especially Black women. Employing the BMI scale as the deciding factor of one’s health also does not consider how women’s weight fluctuates throughout their lifetimes or how a higher BMI is optimal for older people more susceptible to bone injuries.
Most significantly, Quetelet never intended the test to measure one’s health.
In fact, society did not consider weight a primary indicator of health until the 1900s when life insurance actuaries started building lists of height and weight to optimize profits, reported Psychology Today. Researchers could not find any other workable method to measure body and health and merely settled on Quetelet’s test, and, boy, did companies take advantage of it and use it to alienate a whole section of the population.
For example, in 1963, Jean Nidetch, a woman who struggled to lose weight amidst a food addiction, started WeightWatchers, a program in which people monitor their daily food intake, reported the New York Times. In just five years, it sold over 5 million people the idea that thinness equates to health by encouraging dieters to strive for a “normal” BMI range and profiting off their disillusionment.
WeightWatchers was the embodiment of society after it collectively adopted weight as the touchstone of health. Companies universally realized they could weaponize people’s body types and their thirst for thinness as a source of profits.
Body discrimination within the workplace subsequently perpetuates white supremacist capitalist propaganda that we are not right the way we are if we are not white and thin.
White people’s desire to uphold racial hierarchies created the notion of fatness as evidence of “savagery” and an ideal of racialized thinness, according to Sabrina Strings, a sociology professor at the University of California Irvine and author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.
Consequently, to survive — and thrive — in a body in a world that is out of our control, we often must accept we are characters in capitalism’s simulation and consequently shape ourselves to fit the blueprint society labels as acceptable. Those who don’t comply with the rules — or try to but are not physically able to mold themselves like Play-Doh to look the way society deems as “healthy”— are met with contempt and blatant fatphobia within the workforce.
This is especially pertinent considering one’s health is not contingent on their body size; however, size bias endorses the false narrative that overweight individuals are unhealthy. People with obesity can still be metabolically healthy and oftentimes are genetically predisposed to weigh more than some of their peers, according to a 2018 study about the “war on obesity.”
Despite its arbitrariness, thinness became the gateway to the more lucrative corners of the workplace.
One of the most insidious parts about weight discrimination in the workforce is how “‘wellness’ has increasingly become a luxury commodity” in our economy — a pricey feat, the New York Times reported. Often, to conform to a more palatable version by societal standards, we must treat our bodies as projects to invest in. However, this creates a paradox for many obese individuals: they need to actively partake in capitalism to survive but lack the means of subsistence.
There are significant salary disparities between obese individuals and their counterparts.
“Women with obesity can receive up to 6% less for the same work, whilst men with obesity may tend to sort themselves into lower-paying jobs,” according to the World Obesity Federation.
More often than not, overweight people are less likely to be able to afford the $40 SoulCycle classes and $17 Erewhon smoothies that our society markets as the tools required to achieve the elusive beauty standard.
The phenomenon of weight bias is especially pertinent to women, especially low-income women. While obese men make $2 less per hour than normal-weight peers, obese women earn half of their normal-weight peers, according to a Vanderbilt study from 2014,
A disturbing deep-rooted notion within the American work culture is that women are less desirable if they do not meet the thin body paradigm.
Society correlates thin women with venerated ideals in the workplace, including “self-discipline, thrift, and hard work,” according to a 2010 Judge and Cable study.
If they do not acquiesce to the Bella Hadid-esque body type, it “disrupts the illusion of the superhuman control and willpower that is so closely tied to competence in working women,” CNBC reported.
Consequently, they must work harder to prove themselves of equal value, often capitulating to patriarchal standards of what their bodies should look like rather than what is realistic.
In 2016, a New Jersey court upheld a decision permitting an Atlantic City casino to fire its cocktail waitresses — “Borgatta Babes” — if they gained more than 7% of their body weight, the New York Post reported. The waitresses argued the role of gender-based discrimination at the casino, claiming that their employers subjected them to weigh-ins, unlike the male bartenders there.
The workforce, in general, was not built for women, and the lack of legislation shielding them from size bias puts them at a further disadvantage, reinforcing the dangerous notion that, especially for them, thinness equates to success in the workforce.
Employees’ worthiness transcends their appearance, but refusing to safeguard people from size discrimination falsely implies that one’s intelligence or adeptness at their respective trade is contingent on smallness. We need a world where it is universally safe to pursue one’s dreams regardless of their size.
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