Thinner women earn more than overweight ones. How race and gender influence the notion of obesity
While doctors might have a clear definition for obesity and the tools to determine if somebody is overweight, outside hospital walls things are different. People are “thin enough” or “too fat” based on gender, race and generation, a new study shows.
Researchers from Cornell University looked at measures, wages, family income, marriage rates and spousal earning both over time and across gender and race.
One of the more notable findings of the study was just how much society expects white women to be thin. The higher a white woman’s BMI, the lower her wages.
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Conversely, white women with the lowest body mass had the highest wages. The patterns for white men are consistent with a body norm too – one that’s not too thin and not too fat.
“We find quite consistent patterns for white Americans across outcomes and over time. For white men, there was a penalty both for being too thin and for being too fat. For white women, thinner was nearly always better. For African-Americans, the link between body mass and these outcomes dissipates […] people seem to have become more accepting of larger bodies. But that’s not true for whites,” co-author Vida Maralani, associate professor of sociology at Cornell said.
According to Maralani, the focus on the medical definition of obesity has led scientists to lose track of the fact that, in the social world, people have quite subjective and fluid definitions of what it means to be fat or thin for different groups.
The study appeared on April 19 in Sociological Science. Maralani’s co-author is Douglas McKee, a senior lecturer in Cornell’s Department of Economics.
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